Report from the Re: activism conference in Budapest (www.re-activism.net)
14-16 october 2005
by Jerneja Rebernak
Re:activism conference in Budapest www.re-activism.net
14-16 October 2005
by Jerneja Rebernak
The Central European University in cooperation with the Centre for Media and Communication Studies opened its doors to the conference with a screening of the documentary The Yes Man, which presented direct action oriented activists who created a web page similar to the WTO. They present themselves as the real representatives of the institution, playing fakes and highlighting satirically the damages of trade agreements at conferences, talk shows and meetings. The cracking from the audience, while seeing the performance of the Yes Man’s golden suit and large phallus-like costume exploded in the auditorium. Still, the official beginning of the conference was overwhelmed with an atmosphere that reflected mostly high-level intellectual engagement to current debates of new media practices with a theoretical tone and the spirit of activism in the urban space.
Urban fabric and activism
The presentation panels on the first day were focusing on issues of the civic use of new media, new media and global civil society, new media and democratic elections and nevertheless activism and the urban fabric. I attended the latter session for the morning presentations. The room was overcrowded and my attention was immediately directed towards Daniel Tucker, an artist and researcher from Chicago, who shared some stories of the appropriation of public spaces through creative engagement under the name of Counter Productive Industries. Claiming and appropriating public spaces during the first anti-war (2001) protests in Chicago created a certain amount of fear in the mass media with exaggerated sensational first-page news pictures and photos exaggerating with dichotomies us-them like. After all some more strategic plans of action were soon to follow the street demonstrations. Hybrid social spaces were created where activists gathered in a ground zero space where they started to brainstorm ideas and strategies for reclaiming urban spaces: The department of space and land reclamation was founded. Numerous proposals to reclaim public spaces were created and activist began urban installations that openly challenged racist and classist discourses, consumerism, manipulative advertisement and anti-gay laws. Similar projects that claimed autonomous territories and created spaces of resistance and establishing free speech zones spread also in other urban centres of North America. Carnival like centres where activists and artists started projects concerning affordable housing were encouraged to emerge from the practices of previous disobedient actions. However I think was missing in the presentation was the specific lack of analysis of this type of activities. It is in fact the character of repetitive actions that encourage the maintenance of hybrid spaces in the city. For example the need for backstage information on initiatives (discussions on mailing lists, mobilisation strategies, plan of further strategies) that emerged from such urban activity can encourage reflectivity from existing groups as well as understanding the role of new media as tools that composite local communities into networks.
My attention was triggered later on by the story of the political change in Indonesian after decades of Suharto dictatorship (1965-1998) provoked by the use of both new and old media. The researcher Merlyna Lim developed a reflexive scheme; I had earlier in mind that linked activities of cyberactivists and street activists with the public space. In her understanding the physical space is closely related to the activity of the citizen. She clearly showed how the use of new media in the Indonesian context created a possibility for political change and encouraged the process of democratisation. She argues that every space is also a political space where a collective political identity is formed. During the Suharto rule all public spaces were manipulated and forced to be political (weekly exercises, parades, etc.). Territorial control created a strong panopticon model of the public space and the media. There was no heterogeneous public space and all media were Suharto’s, where freedom was disabled. In fact every activity in the public space had to be authorised by the party and a strong self-control attitude towards the neighbour appeared. When the Internet appeared the state closely monitored the use of the Internet. However a space for grassroots engagement succeeded and declared its autonomy from the president. When the news of Suharto’s wealth was discovered a very intense dissemination of information started all over Indonesia. Only 1% of the population in Indonesia had access to the Internet and few cyberactivist groups engaged in the dissemination of information through new media. However, street activists (taxi drivers, students, cafe owners), using mouth-to-mouth communication and ‘old’ media played a decisive factor starting a bottom up mobilisation process.
The same public spaces that were tightly controlled by the state become the spaces where citizens gathered to protest against Suharto’s dictatorship. After all, Lim argues, a strong relationship was created between the physical spaces and the cyber space. From a controlled public space through the hybrid space online, the physical space become to signify the collective will of the people.
The afternoon discussion of the same panel was dislocated into various themes. The one on urban actions criticised urban installations in the public space without a real appeal to activism, specifically in the autonomous centre of Christiania in Copenhagen. Andrew Paterson said that there is a need to share the same content to generate new meanings in the public space. In the example of urban installations in Christiania there was less content to be shared with the public. This lack of a content created a vacuum of meanings and the artistic installations were only unreachable black boxes.
Another opinion was oriented towards activists in general and their default position (the oppositional stance) towards their projection in the future, but no link to new media was here addressed. The issue was broadly generalised in the sense that activism was criticised for not dealing with concrete issues and solutions. Somebody even acknowledged that lobbying in the backstage of politics was the right approach to concrete issues. The answer to this critique was implicit in the appropriation of media technologies and do-it-yourself practices. In fact the most interesting link between activism and the urban fabric emerged from the example of the Easy Link project in Detroit. Inside one small community in the big city sharing knowledge and experiences between communities on the outskirts is a necessity. Most of the time wireless communities cluster often only in the city centre. A local community in Detroit constructed a wireless network from scratch using low technology. They searched how to build a wireless infrastructure taking from the description of projects directed to the African continent. Locally the Internet could represent a possible solution in the search for job, local administration and in solving problems on the ground.
Global civil society panel
The discussion of the panel Global civil society did not critique enough the concept of representation of the NGO and civil society actors that use this label to address issues and determine agenda inside world forums and institutionalised summits. There was not enough analysis to determine what is the meaning of inclusion and exclusion inside the debate of global civil society. There was no proposition to deal with practices outside frameworks of politics or to recreate autonomous networks that replace and subvert social schemes of political engagement. For example the information society in a sense of an electronic market place, were a tribal gift culture reflecting the spirit of the sixties was mentioned, was labelled as pure utopia. Such an imaginative future was not triggered by possible debates of empowerment either the consideration of a communication rights perspective. On the other hand, with the spread of new technologies that change also the political environment of institutions, the position of a representative of the Hungarian NGO was highly positive of being now included into the network of other European institutions. Sharing the same network and getting first hand information directly from the decision centre being in Brussels was mentioned as a success. Dominique Cardon, a French sociologist also enthusiastically presented the example of the European and the World Social Forum as great examples of success stories in the inclusionist context of the global civil society. At this point I have missed the specific engagement of active proponents that critically reflect on these success stories. Interventions from representatives was mere performative and less constructive towards different views of activism.
Cultural Jamming
The second day the panels included themes of political economy of peer production networks, state intervention and regulation, culture jamming as well as memory and archive. Presentations were running simultaneously, however I was interested in the use of false information as a strategy to communication guerrilla in the culture jamming panel and the presentation of activist media in global governance in the second panel. In the cultural jamming panel Klaus Schönberger, a researcher on social movements and patterns of action and communication of protest, presented the use of fakes as disruptive elements inside mainstream media focusing also on the example of the Yes Man. He says that there is no need to interrupt the existing channels of communication as a reaction to the industrial societies. The reception of false communicative action should not destroy meanings generated inside mainstream media, but disrupt them. Communication that runs through new media is the goal in itself. The diffusion of symbols is closer to the medium of the Internet, since its users are enclosed in semantic meanings. Small groups deliver their own information using new media and create virtual realities using Manuel Castells’ definition. To appropriate new technologies allows intervention in a different social space – where a new communication environment is formed. Performances of cyber theatre or recombinant practices are possible, still in the different socio-cultural perspectives. In fact, he acknowledges that the appropriation and the use of new media are shaped by user’s context – specific political structures and the social environment. Perhaps this was the most signifying presentation of the conference, since it addressed concretely new media and activism through a close analytical understanding of the role of communicative interventions in the social context of industrial societies.
In the discussion concerning culture jamming many contested the need for concept making in activism. Disobedience is often associated with forms of negativity and there is a need to contest war types of terminology in activist practices. This is a representational problem that activists needs to face and to contest. The answer to this representational problem is indeed capitalism, which needs to legitimize and give names to activities in its cultural spectre. The real purpose of war type terminology of activism (guerrilla communication, etc.) is a consequence of representation in the social environment. Practices dealing with culture jamming are part of the capitalist system and need to be given a name. In order to function as disruptive elements in the cultural order activists are labelled negatively by the system. This type of contestation was answered with an ironic solution: they should invoke passivism to oppose this kind of legitimizations (in this way they will encourage positive labelling?). However I couldn’t consider seriously the proposed solution to work effectively. This position evokes other types of negative connotations such as couch activism and does not highlight the true challenge to representational schemes.
State Intervention and Regulation
In the panel addressing state intervention and regulation, Arne Hintz presented his research on the practices of media activism specifically surrounding the World Summit on the Information Society. He acknowledged that global governance includes the participation of new actors, redistributes spaces and policy layers. A network of multiple actors emerged from the inclusion of civil society caucus. In fact civil society actors could manage assigned functions favourising a democratisation processes that exists in a multistakeholder approach to global governance. Still, a division occurs between NGOs and grassroots groups in managing strategies to establish dialogue and pursue goals that challenge the leaders of global governance. In the media caucus, community media represents only one part of the civil society spectre. On the other hand radical critiques of global governance that are outside classical representational frameworks organised themselves in a counter summit in Geneva 2003 called We Seize. In this space multiple activities emerged from the autonomous media groups that claimed media diversity, open broadcast licenses and secure basis for community media. I think the speaker should have brought a variety of activities during the We Seize event to light, but the shortage of time didn’t allow exploring events in detail. However this presentation attempted to bridge the panel with a wide perspective of initiatives and critical thinking towards global governance and media regulation.
In conclusion, the Re:activism conference was merely reproposing models of academic papers and discussions. The discussions did not lead towards challenges of new media in the current political and social environment. The morning panels were also compressed and the timing for presentations left out time for concrete questions to the presenters. The discussion panels started with even more presentations added to those in the morning sessions. Also the audience participation in this sense was rather small. I would rather prefer to have fewer presentations to focus on in order to show how practices of empowerment redesignate theoretically and practically network environments. There was also small engagement with the role of activism outside the western perspective. In fact, the Re:activism conference was happening more outside rather than on the inside of the event.
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Jerneja Rebernak, jerneja99(at)gmail.com