Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Media (An)archaeology, Ecologies, and Minor Knowledges
- 2 Armed Guerrilla Media Ecologies from Latin America to Europe
- 3 Autonomy Movements, the Nexus of 1977, and Free Radio
- 4 Militant Anti-Cinemas, Minor Cinemas and the Anarchive Film
- 5 Ecologies of Radical and Guerrilla Television
- Conclusion: Terms of Cybernetic Warfare
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Key Film, Television, and Video Cited
- Index
3 - Autonomy Movements, the Nexus of 1977, and Free Radio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Media (An)archaeology, Ecologies, and Minor Knowledges
- 2 Armed Guerrilla Media Ecologies from Latin America to Europe
- 3 Autonomy Movements, the Nexus of 1977, and Free Radio
- 4 Militant Anti-Cinemas, Minor Cinemas and the Anarchive Film
- 5 Ecologies of Radical and Guerrilla Television
- Conclusion: Terms of Cybernetic Warfare
- Endnotes
- Bibliography
- Key Film, Television, and Video Cited
- Index
Summary
Introduction: Radical Politics, Bifurcations, and the Event
An infinite series of bifurcations: this is how we can tell the story of our life, our loves, but also of the history of revolts, defeats and restorations of order … It is not we who decide but the concatenations: machines for the liberation of desire and mechanisms for control over the imaginary. The fundamental bifurcation is always this one. (Berardi 2009, p. 7)
So far, this book has focused on what could be described as one side of a series of bifurcations, both within modes of action and organization in radical politics and, as will be shown in the remainder of this book, between radical politics and radical media. It is not simply the case that certain individuals chose to adopt a clandestine, guerrilla mode of political organization, as opposed to either continued involvement in mass political movements or the elaboration of radical modes of media expression, even if this decision seems to characterize the biographies of some of the participants, especially of RAF and Weather. The bifurcations were rather collective and machinic processes of splitting and transformation that affected entire political movements as they encountered different and antagonistic series of events characterized both by the increasing radicalization of social movements and their increasing repression at the hands of police and other repressive state apparatuses, such as state security forces of various kinds.
In the 1970s, this turn towards clandestine political violence was by no means a marginal phenomenon, even if it was engaged in by a minority of even the most politically engaged militants. At the same time, these phenomena have been persistently misunderstood, whether as irrelevant or marginal to the movements from which they emerged, or as responsible for their destruction whether inadvertently or as part of some conspiratorial state strategy. Such seems to be the point of view of critics as divergent as Todd Gitlin on the one hand, and Felix Guattari and Toni Negri on the other; the latter describing, in New Forms of Alliance, what they call the terrorist interlude as follows: ‘from all points of view, red terrorism was a disastrous interlude for the movement’ (Guattari and Negri 2010, p. 70).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Guerrilla NetworksAn Anarchaeology of 1970s Radical Media Ecologies, pp. 137 - 192Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018