What is it about?

This book examines a range of radical practices in the 1970s from urban guerrilla and autonomist movements to radical audiovisual media. 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.

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Why is it important?

This book is ground breaking in that it brings together theories of media archaeology and ecologies with radical media, exploring the latter in terms of material machinic practices, and connecting up the former with its radical potentials. It therefore provides an innovative solution to impasses within both cultural and social movement studies as well as studies of media, precisely by connecting these up with a transversal but consistent range of theories from both media archaeology and the more radical tendencies in the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. The overarching concept of guerrilla media allows for these multiple phenomena and conceptual approaches to be articulated together in relation to the 1970s. As such it makes contributions to media and political theory, media archaeology, film and television studies, and studies of popular music and radio.

Perspectives

For me this was a very important work that brought together parallel interests in radical politics, media theory and specifically theories of audiovisual media. In particular it provided a way to bring together theoretically rich but largely apolitical elements of German media theory by recasting media archaeology as media anarchaeology, following and extending the work of Zielinski and Kittler into new domains. At the same time, it allowed me to create new conjunctions between radical practices in film, video and radio and radical theory, especially to highlight the thought of Deleuze, Foucault and Guattari in the 1970s in relation to both radical media and political practices. As such this is the most important work I have published and one that brings together over a decade of research in these different domains.

Michael Goddard
University of Westminster

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This page is a summary of: Guerrilla Networks, February 2018, Amsterdam University Press,
DOI: 10.5117/9789089648891.
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