dj readies (Craig J. Saper): Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto (2012)

Intimate Bureaucracies is a history from the future looking backward at our present moment as a turning point. Our systems of organization and control appear unsustainable and brutal, and we are feeling around in the dark for alternatives. Using experiments in social organization in downtown New York City, and other models of potential alternative social organizations, this manifesto makes a call to action to study and build sociopoetic systems.

One alternative system, the Occupy movement, has demands and goals beyond the specific historical moment and concerns. This short book/manifesto suggests that the organization and communication systems of Occupying encampments represent important necessities, models, goals, and demands, as well as an intimate bureaucracy that is a paradoxical mix of artisanal production, mass-distribution techniques, and a belief in the democratizing potential of social media.

Participatory decentralization, a mantra of political networks, expresses a peculiar intimate bureaucratic form. These forms of organization represent a paradoxical mix of artisanal production, mass-distribution techniques, and a belief in the democratizing potential of social media. Borrowing from mass-culture image banks, these intimate bureaucracies play on forms of publicity common in societies of spectacles and public relations. Intimate bureaucracies monitor the pulse of the society of the spectacle and the corporatized bureaucracies: economics as in Big Business, culture as in Museums and Art Markets, mass media as in Studio Systems and Telecommunication Networks, safety as in Big Brother militarized police forces, and politics as in Big Government. Rather than simply mounting a campaign against big conglomerations of business, government, police, and culture, these intimate bureaucracies and their works use the forms of corporate bureaucracies for intimate ends. Rather than reach the lowest common denominator, they seek to construct what those in the business world would call niche marketing to ultra-specific demographics. Businesses, interested in utilizing the World Wide Web and the Internet, already use these strategies for niche marketing. The historical examples and sketches, explored in this pamphlet, examine how these cultural experiments emulate and resist the systems used in Internet marketing.

The apparent oxymoron, intimate bureaucracies, suggests not only a strategy, but the very basis for the new productive mythology surrounding the electronic World Wide Web.

Intimacy, the close familiarity of friendship or love, by definition depends on a small-scale system of communication. Its warmth, face-to-face contact, and fleeting impact has often made it the subject of art and literature. It usually only appears in administration situations as either an insincere ornamentation of a political campaign (“pressing the flesh” or “kissing babies”), or as inappropriate office behavior (affairs, gossip, child abuse, etc.), but rarely as the center of a political system. The “small is beautiful” movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s did suggest the possibility of an intimacy in politics, but not how to scale the system to the size of a government.

Publisher Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York; with AK Press Tactical Media, Baltimore / Oakland / Edinburgh; and Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson, March 2012
ISBN 978-0615612034
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
60 pages

publisher

PDF

Stefan Szczelkun: Exploding Cinema 1992 – 1999: Culture and Democracy (2002)

The Exploding Cinema is a fusion of projection, performance and social occasion. Architectural spaces, transformed with the use of slides and looped film projections, are used as the backdrop for a programme of short videos, film and performance. A ‘master of ceremonies’ sets up an informal dialogue with the audience, introduces the films and gives filmmakers who are present the chance to speak. She invites the audience to show their films in the future – with the promise that nothing will be censored and everything will be shown. By thoughtful programming this open way of soliciting material results in a varied and lively programme, which continues to attract large audiences.

The Exploding Cinema is democratically run by an open collective. In the last ten years it has put on more that 100 events, showing the work of around 1000 filmmakers, with audience numbers averaging around 200. It is fiercely independent of public grants and supports itself entirely from admission charges.

The group is contextualised against a background of, on the one hand, similarly open cultural formations experienced by the author since 1967 and, on the other, by a history of underground cinema and home movies.

Culture’s central function is taken as being the ongoing total qualitative assessement of any community’s condition. The need for a theoretical framework to develop this basic concept leads to a consideration of Jurgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action (1981) critiqued using Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The relation between cultural expression, a community of understanding and democratic consensus is argued as being at the base of an appreciation of such collective activity.

Groups like Exploding Cinema are often complex and multi-layered, with multiple and dynamic authorship. Their discourses can be largely informal, oral and unrecorded. Research methods used should be transparent and their limitations acknowledged.
It is proposed that representations that arise from a triangulation of several methodologies would provide a better basis for historical discourse than any singular approach. Two methodologies are used to analyse existing data (Content Analysis and Semiotics) and two are used to obtain new data (Participant Observation and Oral History). The partial results of each of these are then brought together with traditional archival methods to construct a historical account in which thematic and chronological strands are interwoven.

Phd Thesis
School of Communications, Royal College of Art London, 2002

ExplodingCinema.org online resource

View online (HTML)

Mute, 3(2): Politics My Arse (2012)

‘Well, the first thing I want to say is, politics my arse’ Issue 2 includes: cover art by Johnny Spencer * Alberto Toscano on logistics and anarchism * Gail Day on postmodernism at the V&A * Brian Ashton zooms in on RFID * Mark Neocleous on generalised anxiety * Benjamin Noys on spaghetti communism * Howard Slater on the August riots * Mme Tlank and Mira Mattar on motherly love, care and capital * Stefan Szczelkun on Gregory Sholette’s book, Dark Matter * Anustup Basu on the Arab Spring * Sander on why China won’t save capitalism

Editor Josephine Berry Slater
Publisher Mute, February 2012

View online (HTML articles)