Fibreculture Journal (Oct 2011)
FCJ-126 The Becoming Environmental of Power: Tactical Media After Control
Abstract
Tactical Media (TM) was originally conceived during a period of widespread mediadiversification, enabled mainly through digital and networked technologies. In the classic conceptualization offered by Geert Lovink and David Garcia for the Next Five Minutes events in the 1990s, Michel de Certeau’s notion of everyday tactics was used to describe the appropriation of cheap consumer electronics for the pursuit of socio-political change through radical heterogenesis. This article tracks theoretical legacies of TM in light of contemporary debates on a shift toward sustainability and strategic imperatives for media activism, particularly in terms of critiques of the tactical presented in the transition to organized networks (Rossiter, Lovink). It maintains that issues of scale and temporality are crucial for considering critical uses of media, however, these dimensions can no longer be read through a framework based exclusively on disciplinary logics. I argue that these distinctions between strategies and tactics are no longer effective given the intensive and transversal qualities of networked modes of power that characterize the current socio-political moment. The article follows discussions on later Foucaudian frameworks on governmentality and the dispositif of security, and outlines the implications of these distinct diagrams for projects currently associated with the term TM. Highlighting, in particular, what Brian Massumi has described as the locally self-organizing and globally amplifying threats for large-scale disruption that characterize the ‘becoming-environmental’ of power (the biopolitical), I outline a different conceptual approach for critical media art projects in terms of the transduction and individuation of human and nonhuman agencies.
