About the Book
The radical youth movements of the 1960s and '70s gave rise to both militant political groups ranging from urban guerrilla groups to autonomist counterculture, as well as radical media, including radio, music, film, video, and television. This book is concerned with both of those tendencies considered as bifurcations of radical media ecologies in the 1970s. While some of the forms of media creativity and invention mapped here, such as militant film and video, pirate radio and guerrilla television, fit within conventional definitions of media, others, such as urban guerrilla groups and autonomous movements, do not. Nevertheless what was at stake in all these ventures was the use of available means of expression in order to produce transformative effects, and they were all in different ways responding to ideas and practices of guerrilla struggle and specifically of guerrilla media. This book examines these radical media ecologies as guerrilla networks, emphasising the proximity and inseparability of radical media and political practices.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction: Chapter 1: Media (An)archaeology, Radical Media Ecologies and Popular Knowledges Introduction: The Long 1970s Concepts of Media Archaeology, Anarchaeology and Media Ecologies Radical and Guerrilla Media Popular Culture, Minor Subjugated Knowledges and Expressive Machines Chapter 2: Armed Guerrilla Media Ecologies from Latin America to Europe and the United States Introduction: Contra ‘Mass Mediated Terrorism’ Revolution in the Revolution: The Urban Guerrilla Concept from Latin America to Europe and North America Brigate Rosse and Armed Struggle in Italy The ‘Baader Meinhof Complex’ and the June 2nd Movement Weather Variations: Weatherman, the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army Chapter 3: Autonomy Movements, the Nexus of 1977 and Free Radio Introduction: Radical Politics, Bifurcations and the Event Italian Workerism and Autonomia 1977 as Nexus: The Movement of 1977, Creative Autonomia and Punk Rebellious Radio from the Avant-garde to Free Radios Media beyond ‘Socialist Strategy’: Enzensberger, Baudrillard and the Genealogy of Radio Alice The Media Ecology of Radio Alice Chapter 4: Militant Anti-Cinemas, Minor Cinema and the Anarchive Film Introduction: Destroying the (Cinema) Apparatus, Transforming the (Audiovisual) Machine Militant Anti-Cinemas in the 1970s Minor Anti-Cinemas: Anti Psychiatric, Heretical, Feminist and Postcolonial The Counter Public Sphere, Anarchive Film and Documentary Symptomatologies Chapter Five: Ecologies of Radical and Guerrilla Television Introduction: Cinema/Television/Video or Cain vs. Abel Revisited Sonimage, Fassbinder and Radical Auteur Television Ecologies of Guerrilla Television: Ant Farm, Raindance Corporation, TVTV and Radical Software Conclusions: Terms of Cybernetic Warfare
About the Author :
Dr Michael N. Goddard is Reader in Film, Television and Moving Image in the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on Polish and international cinema and audiovisual culture as well as cultural and media theory. He recently published a book, Impossible Cartographies on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music focusing on groups such as The Fall, Throbbing Gristle and Laibach and culminating in editing two books on noise, Reverberations and Resonances. He is currently working on a book on the British post-industrial group Coil, and beginning a new research project on genealogies of immersive media and virtuality.
Review :
'Guerrilla Networks succeeds in extending contemporary theoretical orientations with regard to media ecologies and archaeologies and their connections with political questions and system materialities. This is relevant, and important as we increasingly face the challenges and hazards of guerrilla information war using manipulated and weaponized content in an increasingly digital world that contextualizes the social, political, economic, and creative ecologies in which we frame contemporary life.' - John F. Barber Leonardo Reviews, February 2019 'Michael Goddard is the consummate intellectual crate digger. Here he unearths some secret seventies classics that will blow your mind, maybe blow up some buildings, and definitely blow the dust from any settled notion of media.' - Professor Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London 'Michael Goddard's original excursions through guerrilla media ecologies in radio, film, music, video, and television animate unexpected encounters with the tactics of urban guerrilla cells in the 1970s. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Goddard emphasises the minor knowledges and practices of guerrilla media experiments concerned with striking blows to dominant communication circuits. Guerrilla Networks is a perceptive and provocative book that plots its own tactical itinerary of movements through and between breathtakingly rich socio-technical contexts to find resonance in some contemporary iterations of activism, art, and hacking.' - Dr. Kimberly Mair, Associate Professor, University of Lethbridge, author of Guerrilla Aesthetics: Art, Memory, and the Urban Guerrilla (2016) 'Goddard's subject is the subversion or take-over of the media as a post-1968 project: a new underground of critique and provocation that, in this reading, tracked, infiltrated and interrogated the ways in which 1970s capitalism reasserted psychic control over its unwitting subjects. Guerrilla Networks, with a methodological scope and nuance vastly in advance of the field, recovers a vital period in terms of politics and aesthetics that was both brilliant and impossible.' - Dr. Benjamin Halligan, University of Wolverhampton and author of Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film (2016) 'Michael Goddard provides an invaluable guide to a too often forgotten history of radical media practices, from Maodadaism to guerrilla television. Today in an age of the mediatization of all of life it is precisely these attempts to hijack media cultures into spaces of liberation that are more relevant to learn from than ever before.' - Dr. Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex and author of The Compositions of Movements to Come
