autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe, Luther Blissettt and Sonja Brünzels

Communication guerrilla - a message out of the deeper german backwoods / 

Version 2.0. (all rights dispersed)

The starting point for our reflections on communication guerrilla is a rather  trivial insight from our own actions: information and political education are  completely useless if nobody wants to listen. After years of distributing  leaflets and brochures about all kinds of disgraces, of organising  informative talks and publicising texts, we have come to question the common  belief in the strength and glory of information.  Traditional radical politics strongly relies on the persuasive power of  rational argument. The belief in the power of  plain information as an  effective form of political action is almost unshakeable. In a theoretical  framework that constructs a manipulative network of media messages  influencing the consciousness of the masses, critical content and the  unimpeded spread of 'truth' is seen as a sufficient tool to set the false  consciousness right.  Since the declaration of postmodernism it has become a bit unfashionable to  insist on The One And Only Truth. Yet still, traditional concepts of radical  political communication are still acting according to the saying: 'whoever possesses the senders can control the thoughts of people'. This hypothesis relies on a very simple model of communication. It only  focuses on the 'sender' (in case of mass communication usually centrally and  industrially organised), the 'channel' which transports the information, and  the 'receiver'. The hissing sounds in the channels of information are almost  neglected. Neither the euphoria around information society nor its  pessimistic critics - who worry about information overkill - are facing one  of the most crucial problems of bourgeois representational democracies:  factual information, even if it becomes commonplace, does not necessarily  trigger any consequences. Even if stories of disasters, injustice, social and  ecological scandals are being published, this rarely leads to much  consequence. 

In recent years, there has been much reflection on the interrelations between  the reception of information, knowledge production and the options to act  within a social context. More emphasis is given to the codes which senders  and receivers are using in writing and reading messages. The question was -  and is:  how can information become meaningful and how can it then become  socially relevant. Information by itself has neither meaning nor consequences - both only evolve  from active reception and depend on the scope of action of the audience. But  this basic banality has far too rarely been taken into consideration within  the framework of radical politics.

Guerrilla communication doesn't focus on arguments and facts like most  leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In it's own way, it inhabits a  militant political position, it is direct action in the space of social  communication. But other than many militant positions (stone meets shop  window), it doesn't aim to destroy the codes of power and signs of control.  It prefers to counteract the omnipotent prattling of power by distorting and  disfiguring the meanings. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy,  interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, they focus on  detourning and subverting the messages transported.

But what's new about all this? Nothing, really - after all, there have been  the Berlin Dadaists, the Italian Indiani Metropolitani, the Situationists and  many others. The practise of communication guerrilla can even be traced back  to legendary characters like the Hapsburgian soldier Svejk and Till  Eulenspiegel, the wise fool. Standing on the shoulders of earlier avantgardes, communication guerilla  doesn't claim the invention of a new politics or the foundation of a new  movement. It  is merely continuing an incessant exploration of the jungle of  communication processes, of the intertwined and muddled paths of senders,  codes and recipients. Looking not just at what's being said but focussing on  how it is being said is the method of this exploration. The aim is a  practical, material critique of the very structures of communication as a  basis of power and rule.

The bourgeois system takes it's strength - beyond other things - from it's  ability to incorporate critique. Any democratic government needs an  opposition. Every opinion needs to be balanced with another one, since the  concept of representative democracy relies on the fiction of equal exchange.  Criticism which doesn't fundamentally shatter the legitimacy of the ruling  system tends to become part of it. Communication guerrilla is an attempt to  intervene without getting absorbed by the dominant discourse. We are  experimenting with ways to get involved in situations and at the same time to  refuse any constructive participation.

Power relations have a tendency to appear as normal, even natural and  certainly inevitable. They are deeply inscribed into the rules of everyday  life. Communication guerrilla is one of the ways to create those short and  shimmering moments of confusion and distortion, moments which tell us that  everything could be completely different: a fragmented utopia as a seed of  change. The symbolic order of western capitalist societies is built around  discourses of rationality and rational conduct. Guerrilla communication  relies on the powerful possibility of expressing a fundamental critique  through the non-verbal, paradoxical and mythical.

However, guerrilla communication cannot and is not meant to replace a  rational critique of dominant politics and hegemonic culture. It doesn't  substitute counter-information, but creates additional possibilities for  intervention. Yet this form is more than the topping on the cake, more than a  mere addition to the hard work of 'real' politics and direct, material action. In search for seeds of subversion, guerrilla communication is taking up the  contradictions hidden in seemingly normal, everyday situations. It attempts  to distort normality by addressing those hidden desires that are usually  silenced by omnipresent rules of conduct, rules that define the socially  acceptable modes of behaviour as well as the 'normal' ways of communication  and interpretation. We tend to believe what we want to believe. Just a simple  example: Most people will say that it is not okay to blag the bus-fare, even  if there is a widespread feeling that public transport is too expensive. If,  however, some communication guerrillas at the occasion of an important public  event (like the funeral of Lady Di) manage to distribute fake announcements  declaring that for the purpose of participating, public transport will be  free, the possibility of reducing today's expenses may tempt even those who  doubt the authenticity of the announcement. 

Communication guerrilla is about attacking the power-relations that are  inscribed into the social organisation of space and time, into rules and  manners, into the order of public conduct and discourse. Everywhere in the  'cultural grammar' of a society, legitimations and naturalisations of  economic, political and cultural power and inequality are inscribed.  Everybody has a knowledge of Cultural Grammar - which can be used to cause  irritations by distorting the rules of normality. Such irritations have a  potential to question seemingly natural aspects of social life. Hidden power  relations can be made visible and subverted or deconstructed. Using a term  coined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, one might say that  communication guerrilla aims at a temporary expropriation of Cultural  Capital, at a disturbance of the symbolic economy of social relations. 

Go Internet, experience the Future! The practice of communication guerilla developed in pre-computerised times.  Up to the present day, many communication guerrill@s feel a strange affection  towards living in the backwoods of late capitalist society. There is an  inclination towards the use and abuse of outdated media, such as billboards,  posters, printed books and newspapers, official announcements, face-to-face  events, interventions in public space.  Thus we are sceptical towards the hypes and promises in and about the web. It  is said that liberalism leads us directly into hyperspace. A space of  absolute absence of state control, no-copyright, free production of ideas and  goods, free and equal flow of information and people across all borders, such  is the dream brought forward by some Californian net-ideology of  freedom-and-adventure. Yet neo-liberalism doesn't really work this way, but rather: freedom for the  markets, control for the people. It's becoming more and more obvious that the  internet is no virtual space of freedom beyond state and corporate control.  The law-suit of toy-selling e-company e-toys against the web-artists Etoy has  shown how badly the corporate world wants to take control of the territory of  the web. The subsequent toy-war and the complete victory of the web-artists  was a glimpse on what's possible if we use the web as a space of  intervention. (http://rtmark.com/etoy) There are still opportunities of free interchange, there are lines of  information transmission beyond police control, and some corners of the net  are still governed by potlach economy and not by commercialism. Yet the grip  of corporate economy is tightening - and if they succeed, aesthetics and  functioning of the internet will not be predominated by cyberpunks but by  corporate self-representation interspersed with a myriad of middle-class  wankers exhibiting their home-sweet-homes including garden gnoms on  corporate-sponsored homepages.  Our impression is that the structures and problems of communication in the  web do not differ fundamentally from those encountered elsewhere, at least  not as much as the hype wants to make believe.  Some media-theorists (like Michael Halberstedt in his "Economy of Attention")  have even discovered that the potential recipients of e-information are free  to filter and discard messages. They may do even much more with them! Most  users select messages not mainly according to content. Just like the reader  of a paper or the recipient of a leaflet, they/we also use criteria which may  be conceived in terms of cultural grammar and cultural capital. This is  evident to anybody  who has ever tried to distribute leaflets to people in  the streets. The web's potential to distribute infinite information is just  like traditional media structured by the needs of the audience. The basic  problems of communication are just the same on both sides of the electronic  frontier. To develop tactics to use the web as a space for critical intervention, we  need to move away from the belief in the glory of information. As in public  space, we need to focus on the influence of social and cultural settings. 'Access for all', 'Bandwidth for all': these are legitimate demands if the  web is to be more than an elitist playground of the middle classes. In some  professions, access to adequate means of communication has already become a  vital necessity of everyday life. But information and communication are not  ends in themselves. First of all, they constitute an increasingly important  terrain of social, political and cultural struggle. Even if we're all online,  it doesn't mean that a paradise of equal opportunities will emerge.  We'll  still need to attack power relations inscribed into the structure of  communication processes both inside and outside the web. In the dawn of  information capitalism, such attacks become more than just a method, more  than merely a technology of political activism: When information becomes a  commodity and cultural capital a most important asset, the distortion and  devaluation of both is a direct attack against the capitalist system. To put  it the swanky way: This is class war. Paradoxically, increasing attempts to police the net are also increasing its  attractivity as a field of operation. Fakes and false rumours inside and  outside the web are already  helping to counteract commodification and state  control - after all, the internet is an ideal space for the production of  rumours and fakes. Where technological knowledge is available, the  opportunities to fake or hijack domains and homepages, to spoil and distort  the flux of information are innumerable. Guerrilla communication relies upon  the hypertextual nature of communication processes. Even a newspaper or a  traffic sign has plenty of cross-links to other fragments of 'social text'; a  medium transporting plain text and nothing else cannot exist. Communication  guerrillas consciously distort such cross-links with the aim of  re-contextualising, criticising or disfiguring the original messages. In the  web, hypertextual aspects of communication have for the first time come to  the foreground, and the hypertext offers fascinating possibilities for all  kinds of pranks. Imagine hacking into a homepage of, say, the CIA, but instead of leaving a  blunt 'Central Stupidity Agency ' (see http://www.2600.com/cia/p_2.html)  simply modifying some of the links while leaving everything else as before.  There are terrible things one could do in this manner...

But the fascination of those possibilities should not lead to a technocentric  narrowing of the field of vision. The mythical figure of the hacker  represents a guerrilla directed towards the manipulation of technology - but  to which end? The hacker gets temporary control of a line of communication -  but many of them are mainly interested in leaving web graffiti or simply  'doing it' (see the Hacker Museum, http://www.2600.com). Others, however,  rediscover guerrilla communication practices of the ancient: In: <nettime>  net-artist Heath Bunting slated himself in a fake review (Heath Bunting:  Wired or Tired? http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/), thus re-inventing a method  which Marx and Engels had used when they faked damning reviews by first-rank  economists to draw attention on 'The Capital'.

The internet offers fascinating possibilities also in a quite different  sense: Beyond its reality, THE WEB is an urban myth, and perhaps the  strongest and most vital of all. Social discourse conceives THE WEB as the  location where the people, the pleasures, the sex and the crimes of tomorrow  have already taken place. Go Internet, learn the Future! Fears and desires  are projected onto THE WEB: this is the mythical place where we can see the  future of our society. Paradoxically, the gift of prophecy attributed to the web gives credibility  to any information circulated there. The "real world" believes in them  because they come from the realm of virtuality, and not despite it. An  example: In Germany, there is a longstanding game called "The Invention of Chaos Days"  (http://chaos-tage.de/start.shtml). Since the early 80ies, punks have created  a tradition to hold big meetings. Of course, the towns involved used to be  terrified, the police was alarmed, and more often than not the whole thing  ended up with a huge riot. In 1996, someone put a note in the web relating  that, on day X, all the punks of Germany would  unite in Hanover to transform  it into a heap of rubble. The announcement was made, a few leaflets (maybe a  dozen) were distributed to the usual suspects. That very day, processions of  journalists encountered hosts of riot squads from all over Germany on their  way to Hanover. Once again the forces of public order were on their way to  protect civilisation against the powers of the dark, only the latter were  nowhere to be found. Apparently, they met quietly and undisturbed by police  in another place. The most astonishing thing about this game is that it  worked several times: Obviously, for the guardians of public order and public  discourse, THE WEB is a source of secret knowledge too fascinating to be  ignored. We do not mention in detail the innumerable occasions when journalists, state  officials, secret services etc. were taken in by false rumours circulating in  the net - for instance, the major German press agency dpa who fell for the  homepage of a fake corporation offering human clones, including replicas of  Claudia Schiffer and Sylvester Stallone. This effect has been reproduced: the  next one was a prank about 'ourfirsttime.com'. There is little danger that  mainstream media will learn quickly. is Besides its function as a networking tool, the web is a nice playground  for communication guerrillas, especially those living in the netscapes of  electronic communication. But let's not forget to walk and talk our way  through the jungle of the streets, to visit the not so devastated landscapes  of outdated media, to see and feel the space and the power of capitalism -  may we not forget what all the prankstering is good for.