Networking and Cultural Resistance from Alexander Trocchi to Luther Blissett.

john eden

male pale and stale
Despite Jim's self-effacing nature, this might be a good place to discuss his Thesis:

'THE INVISIBLE INSURRECTION OF A MILLION MINDS:
Networking and Cultural Resistance from Alexander Trocchi to Luther Blissett.


You can download it in Word format from here.

I've only skimmed it so far, but I thought it was pretty good - (tho I've been involved with some of the stuff he mentions so it has a few resonances for me anyway).

I have to go out now, but I'll try to post some more detailed comments later. Possibly when pissed.

Plus, I had to get something in here quick before Mark turned up with a load of stuff I didn't understand. ;)
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Fuck it, I'll talk to myself then...

Two things which grabbed me on the first reading were:

1) some good stuff about the suburbs (ie Trocchi's proposed launch of sigma in a place outside of but close to the city of London) and the part about Martin Denny, in which Hawaii's culture gets filtered through suburban wish fulfilment to become some sort of libidinal cocktail utopia. This is obviously close to some of Ballards stuff and perhaps 76 punk's focus on suburban boredom - wanting to be where it happens.

2) In networking as a form of practice there is always a tension between personalities bringing different flavours, vs the creation of "stars". As Jim says, Project Sigma will always be associated with Trocchi, TOPY included a definite cult of personality around Genesis P-Orridge, despite some trying to escape it... K-Punk's "kollective" will always be associated with Mark and his personal obsessions/themes.

On the other hand you have situations like early techno or whatever where the personalities really weren't the issue (and also arguably in some forms of Neoism) but at some point in the evolution of the network personalities emerged when they were needed (by the music press, by major labels looking to market artist albums rather than compilations etc).

The difficulty seems to be that market forces require marketable individuals - "they myth of the great man" - genius rather than scenius.

There have been conscious attempts to resist this, in multiple name projects like Luther Blissett and Karen Eliot, but these also often become associated with certain individuals also (Stewart Home). You also have underground dance scenes (like the C8 breakcore stuff) where producers often shy away from any kind of interviews/photos/merchandising other than their own 12" releases. In some ways this approach tends towards becoming a bit hermetic though. (Because yadda yadda you can't have anything completely untainted/autonomous under capitalism innit).

I suppose what I am saying is that networking as a tactic uses a certain level of fluid interactivity and anonymity to contest the dominant order. But if a network reaches a certain size, there is a degree of inevitability of it being subverted by this anonymity being negated.

One issue with this is that it's quite easy to do amazing work that nobody other than a close knit community of people (inevitably the ones who are clued up already) has every heard of. Another issue is that there are real problems with trying to bring that work to a larger audience...

No doubt I'll come back and disagree with myself later...
 
john eden said:
One issue with this is that it's quite easy to do amazing work that nobody other than a close knit community of people (inevitably the ones who are clued up already) has every heard of. Another issue is that there are real problems with trying to bring that work to a larger audience...

I don't see any problem there
IMHO it's a perfectly sane (and desirable, I'd add) position to do your stuff without any thought about the audience.

that's the main drag with blogs: too much energy misspent in trying to get attention from people who shouldn't be around you at all

death to audience!
 

john eden

male pale and stale
It depends what you're trying to do, though, Guy?

A lot of the projects in Jim's thesis are, to a greater or lesser extent, involved with social change rather than just producing something which satisfies a small milieu...
 
john eden said:
involved with social change rather than just producing something which satisfies a small milieu...

yes, it does sound very interesting. it is debatable that social change is or isn't always produced by a small milieu which somehow gains power over the masses
 

john eden

male pale and stale
GuyMercier said:
yes, it does sound very interesting. it is debatable that social change is or isn't always produced by a small milieu which somehow gains power over the masses

I think that is one debate that the groups concerned were quite interested in, and broadly came down on the side of "isn't" being the most desireable - May 68 and all that...

Be interested to see what you think of it, Matt! :)
 

Andrew

Member
But how do you engineer that large scale social change? And what does it mean when its the Government that are behind it? Both Blunkett and Brown are running round funding small pockets trying trying to find some way of harnessing the energy of message boards/ blogs et al has with lots of small groups to build new forms of social capital, a new set of relationships between different generations. Is this a good thing?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Andrew said:
But how do you engineer that large scale social change? And what does it mean when its the Government that are behind it? Both Blunkett and Brown are running round funding small pockets trying trying to find some way of harnessing the energy of message boards/ blogs et al has with lots of small groups to build new forms of social capital, a new set of relationships between different generations. Is this a good thing?

I think if there was a clear answer of how to engineer large scale social change we'd all be sitting in a very different world now.

In a sense, the Blairite model (focus groups, "yougov" etc) is what the situtationists called a recuperation of more radical ways of sharing opinion and trying to move things forwards.

Another example would be "regeneration" where people living in rundown areas are encouraged to join quangoes - basically to give the quango a veneer of accountability etc. But the agenda of the quango is generally to gentrify - not to improve things for the existing residents...

I think for things to be positive there has to be a large element of self-organisation, independent of existing structures at least in the initial stages.

Not quite sure what you mean about new relationships between different generations, tho? Sounds interesting - I think the generation gap is what creates a lot of fundamental problems like the fear of crime (and perhaps leads to actual crime like "anti-social behaviour")
 

matt b

Indexing all opinion
john eden said:
Another example would be "regeneration" where people living in rundown areas are encouraged to join quangoes - basically to give the quango a veneer of accountability etc. But the agenda of the quango is generally to gentrify - not to improve things for the existing residents...

a classic example is Community Health Councils, which when they got a bit uppity and started disagreeing with mr blair's agenda got abolished and replaced with a new passive body.
 

&catherine

Well-known member
GuyMercier said:
that's the main drag with blogs: too much energy misspent in trying to get attention from people who shouldn't be around you at all

Damn straight - how can you look upon and contemplate your own writing, when your eyes are glued to your hit counter? Hats off to people who compose things offline for their blogs - not doing so, I always feel that what I write is premature, not having had the benefit of an "internal monologue"...
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Am I still the only person here to have read Jim's thesis, then?

Would it help if I pretended he was mates with Felix Guattari?
 

Andrew

Member
Good point about regeneration, I'm very very loosely involved in stuff to do with the London Olympics 2012 bidand unfortuntately its shaping up to be a future case of exactly what yer talking about (but it might not, they might just get it together.

In terms of the generation gap stuff, bits of the govt (particularly Brown) believe that the Government should do something about the generation gap, and that its worth investing something in trying to builds "intergenerational social capital", or creating a mass forum or space where old and young people can talk to each other about "stuff". I was reading something the other day that was basically saying in terms of the education system helping kids who the tradition/standard educational approach is failing to help them develop basic social skills that it what they really need is just time an space with an adult who will listen to them, whether that be doing drama, football, art whatever, its the time that matters.

In terms of the numbers and the power of small groups theres a line of thinking that the magic number is not 3 but 150. Once a social rouping has more than 150 members its starts alter dramatically and stops working as a single group

I will try and read the paper
 
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