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Diminishing Freedoms On a visit to Brazil in 2004 I stayed with Grazilia Kunsch an important artist who is also a committed political activist. Part of her work is ?hosting? foreign visitors at her house ?Casa Grazie?. To be hosted by Grazie is a delight, not least for her wonderful breakfasts and the long discussions that are given the time to unfold throughout the morning. Like many artists who are politically active she keeps the boundaries between the two spheres deliberately blurry. But she told me how although this was once acceptable, she was finding it progressively harder to declare openly that she is an artist in activist circles. Freedom, the expressive freedom of art seems to becoming the impossible word. Why? What is at stake? Why are so many political activists moving to repudiate cultural politics and the expressive freedoms that continue to inspire and draw so many to call themselves artists? There seems to be an oppressive philistinism emerging on the radical left, raising the worrying prospect that it is not only neo- liberalism that is instrumentalising all of life. I have been troubled by these developments for some time, but I have only recently found a framework to address discuss the problem with myself in more detail and with a little more rigor. It was in the context of a review for a book on DIY Media by the London based artist activist group C6. As always Mute editors are (at least in my case) rarely passive recipients of the articles they solicit, and I was gently prodded into much more than a simple review. I don?t pretend that the resulting ruminations are in any way definitive but I hope that it triggers some discussion. Below is an extract, the full text can be found at http:// www.metamute.org/ The Split We have seen the emergence of three interconnected tendencies, since the tactical media of the 90?s. Firstly there is a widespread rejection of the homeopathic and the micro-political in favour of ambitions scaled up to global proportions coupled with a willingness to move beyond electronic and semiotic civil disobedience and to engage in direct action, to literally ?re-claim the streets?. This is almost entirely as a result of the emergence of the powerful global anti-capitalist movement which (from their perspective) have transformed tactical media into the ?Indy-media? project. But there is also a third less visible and more troubling tendency, a tendency towards internal polarisation. This polarisation is based on a deep split which has opened up between many of the activists at the core of the new political movements and the artists or theorists who, whilst continuing to see themselves as radicals, retain a belief in the importance of cultural (and information) politics? in any movement for social transformation. Although I have little more than personal experience and anecdotal evidence to go on, it seems to me, that there is a significant growth in suspicion and frequently outright hostility among activists to the presence of art and artists in ?the movement?, particularly those whose work cannot be immediately instrumentalised by the new ?soldiers of the left?. So what is it that has changed since the 90s to give rise to these tendencies? To understand we must cast our minds back to the peculiar historical conditions of that time. The early phase of tactical media re-injected a new energy into the flagging project of ?cultural politics?. It fused the radical and pragmatic info politics of the hackers with well-established critical practices based critiques of representation. The resulting tactical media were also part of (and arguably compromised by) the wider internet and communications revolution of the 90?s which, like the music of the 1960s, acted as a universal solvent not only dissolving disciplinary boundaries but also the boundaries separating long established political formations. The power some of us attributed to this new ?media politics? appeared to be born out by the role that all forms of media seemed to have played in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It seemed as though old style armed insurrection had been superseded by digital dissent and media revolutions. It was as if the Samizdat spirit, extended and intensified by the proliferation of Do-it-yourself media had rendered the centralized statist tyrannies of the soviet empire untenable. Some of us allowed ourselves to believe that it would only be a matter of time before the same forces would challenge our own tired and tarnished oligarchies. Furthermore the speed and comparative bloodlessness of the Soviet collapse suggested that the transformations that were coming would not have to be achieved through violence or personal sacrifice. This would be the era of the painless (?win win?) revolution, in which change would occur simply through the hacker ethos of challenging the domains of forbidden knowledge. It came to be believed that power that comes only from the top down had lost its edge. As late as 1999 in his Reith lecture, Anthony Giddens could still confidently assert that ?The information monopoly upon which the Soviet system was based, had no future in an intrinsically open framework of global communications?. Giddens and other third way social theorists were part of a wider movement, which acted out the dream that the profound political differences, which had divided previous generations, had been put on hold. This was made credible through the ubiquity of one of the dominant myths of the information age, a myth shared by activists and new media entrepreneurs alike. The myth that knowledge will set you free. This founding narrative of techno-culture, visible from Ted Nelson ?Computer Lib? onwards, recycles (in intensified form), the age old proposition that knowledge and freedom are not only connected but may actually entail one another. The fact that a belief in the necessary relationship between knowledge and freedom has gone largely unquestioned is based in part on the depth of its lineage, ?ancient stoics and most modern rationalists are at one with Christian teaching on this issue. ?And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free?. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out in 1968 not only is ?. This proposition is not self evidently true, if only on empirical grounds.? It is ?one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.?1 In addition to being fallacious the accompanying rhetoric of transparency, freedom, access, participation, and even creativity, has come to constitute the ideological foundation of ?communicative capitalism?, transforming tactical media?s homeopathic micro-politics into the experimental wing of the ?creative industries? and corroborating the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short- termism.? 2 Neo-liberalism?s effective capture of the rhetoric of ?freedom? and ?creativity?, has re-opened an old fault-line which the first wave of tactical media did so much to bridge, the fault-line dividing artists from the political activists. The theorist and activist Brian Holmes described the origins of this dichotomy succinctly as going (at least) as far back as the cultural politics of the 1960s. He describes a split ?between the traditional working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for individual emancipation and full recognition and expression of particular identities" According to this account corporate foundations and think tanks of the 80s and 90?s have succeeded in inculcating market-oriented variations on earlier counter-cultural values rendering the interventions of artists (including tactical media makers) profoundly if unwittingly, de-politicising. Holmes goes on to describe (or assert, I am not quite sure which) a critique in which ?the narcisstic exploration of self, sexuality and identity become the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and artistic license have led, in effect, to the neo-liberalization of culture.?3 The puritanical and authoritarian tone of this analysis is just a little unnerving. At the very least this tendency could lead to a crass and oppressive philistinism and might signal far worse to come. At the Senegallia meeting in 2004 for Telestreets, Franco Berardi (Bifo) made a plea to Telestreet activists (and by extension all artist/activists) not to ?embrace our miserable marginality". Increasingly this call is being answered. There are a growing number of inspiring cases which we can point to, the Yes Men?s achievement in securing global distribution in mainstream cinemas, Yomango?s high voltage contributions to the global, protest movement and Witness.org?s extensive inititiatives in which the provision of indigenous activists with DIY media with their campaigns is connected to human rights legal processes. These and many other projects are pointing to the growing willingness to strategically globalise dissent. This process in not unconnected to a growing willingness to relinquish one of the shibboleths of tactical media, the cult of ?ephemerality?. In place of the hit and run guerrilla activism the direct opposite is now required, ?duration?. It?s a time for longer- term commitments and deeper engagements with the people and organisations networked around contested issues. One of the most extraordinary examples of this kind of development is ?Women on Waves? a Dutch Foundation initiated by the Rebecca Gomperts who studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam and specialised as an abortion doctor and then went on to study visual arts at the Rietveld Academy and Sailing at the Enkhuizen Zeevaartschool (Nautical College). The most celebrated achievement of Women on Waves is the Abortion Boat, a large floating clinic that tactically exploits maritime law, anchoring the boat just outside the 12-mile zones of countries where abortion is forbidden. On the Abortion Boat women can be helped with information and with actual abortions are performed by a team of Dutch medical practitioners (including Dr Gomperts) on Dutch "territory". Thus, women are actively assisted and local organisations are supported and inspired in their struggle for the legalisation of abortion. Along with the practical intervention of the Abortion Boat, Women on Waves also uses art and design as part of their global campaign for abortion rights. For instance the "I had an Abortion" installation consisting of vests on wire coat hangers, which bear the text "I had an abortion" in all European languages. On their website <womenonwaves.org> a diary can be found of a Brazilian woman relating her experiences of wearing one of these t-shirts. The continued validity of the modes of political address pioneered by tactical media are apparent in her descriptions of how the message on these t- shirts was preferable to something that might have read like earlier forms of agit prop say ?Legalize abortion?. These t-shirts function ?not? she declares to ?make myself a target. that was not the point; it was to give all those women without a face a support. As to say, don't worry, it's all right, you?re all right. This fulfils one of the prime directives of classical tactical media, unlike traditional agit prop?it is designed to invite discourse. Women on Waves is a reminder that cultural politics in its modern sense was in large part a creation of the women?s movement. Those who question the value of a cultural politics would do well to remember that feminism also served to transform the lives and politics of many men who were taught (sometimes painfully) that they were failing to live out in their ordinary lives, the democracy they were advocating in theory. The way in which ?culture? is central to feminism?s demands and not peripheral is powerfully explored by Terry Eagleton in his valuable book After Theory which describes the centrality of ?the grammar? in which the demands are of feminism were framed. ?Value speech, image, experience and identity are here the very language of political struggle, as they are in all ethnic or sexual politics. Ways of feeling and forms of political representation are in the long run quite as crucial as child care provision or equal pay.? 3 This expanded political language was articulated not by activists and writers alone but also by many important women artists. Women artists who were critical in shifting the centre of gravity of the art world of the 60?s and 70?s from Greenburg's formalism and Rosenburg's mysticism to a new expressive and subject centred naturalism, which remains influential and important to this day. In our efforts to understand our new conditions and to change we must beware of trying to eliminate all ambiguities and impurities, above all we should not be tempted to relinquish the essential legacy of cultural politics. 1. Isaiah Berlin From Hope and fear Set Free 1968 2.Rossiter & Lovink. Dawn of the Organised Networks (2005) 2. Brian Holmes?s review THE SCANDAL OF THE WORD "CLASS" Posted on nettime A review of David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford UP, 2005) 3. Terry Eagleton. After Theory. (Penguin 2003) 4. womenonwaves.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net