Bhaskar’s recent Dissent article, “The Anarcho-Liberal,” posits the post–New Left existence of an “anti-intellectualism that manifested itself in a rejection of “grand narratives” and structural critiques of capitalism, abhorrence for the traditional forms of left-wing organization, a localist impulse, and an individualistic tendency to conflate lifestyle choices with political action.” While his suggestion that this current in leftism be dubbed “anarcho-liberalism” further stretches the already elastic term of liberalism, his recognition and naming of the deficits of the erstwhile “anti-globalization” movement is apt. And, perhaps now more than ever, it is a necessary corrective at a time when demonstrations appear to again be forming the visible tip, like the top third of the proverbial iceberg, of an active politics on the ground. However, I would like to deepen this conversation, if I can, over the course of two blog posts, so as to contextualize the “localist impulse” within its “globalized” context; link the “anarcho-liberal” movement to the long standing leftist enthusiasm for “tacticality” and its methodology, and point to some of the observations made by political scientist David Chandler, who has had anarcho-liberalism’s number pegged for years. This first installment will address tacticality and its popular manifestation as “Tactical Media” (TM). If the the anarcho-liberal is the offspring of anarchism and (a certain strain of) liberalism, Tactical Media is its adopted parent. Here’s why.

As Bhaskar notes, the organizational strategies of the Left changed dramatically in accord with the left’s marginalization in the 1980s. The Left’s disillusionment with mass politics may be an old story, but the organizational (or disorganizing) processes this disillusionment wrought is often not charted properly. Some key elements are sometimes glossed over. The standard explanation resides in the two-pronged explanation which saw eighties/nineties activist circles delve further and further into a politics of individual “conscience” and the ivory tower became enamored of biopower, difference, identity politics and the location of agency in the act of reception. In both instances, micropolitics eclipsed macro. Concurrent with these changes in scholarly and activist circles was the rise of the internet and the advent of “globalization.” Both the internet, the technological scaffolding for the “global village,” and its substructure, globalizing logics, extended tremendous pressures on social formations the world over. The effect of these developments were, as they say, “game changers.” Globalization, the global triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism, twinned with technological apparatuses rendering communication instantaneous, had a profound double effect on the left: The end-of-history narratives of globalization seemed so daunting as to throw avenues of resistance for a loop, while the networking enabled by the internet seemed to proffer the possibility of new collectivities, subjectivities and forms of resistance. But conceptions of the organizational possibilities engendered by the latter carried with them anxieties wrought by the former.

Although the term “Tactical Media” may be unfamiliar to some readers, its ethos and freight are in evidence in bookstores, classrooms, activist canteens, and artist co-ops. And doubly so a decade ago. The phenomenon arose in late eighties / early nineties, unnamed, in the unholy union of techno-anarcho utopians (think R. U. Sirius, the triumphalist techno-fetishist spirit of Mondo 2000, and the brashness of industrial avant-garde) and the ascendant mode of political pranking dubbed “culture jamming” (think Adbusters and anti-advertising / anti-consumerist sentiment). The Practise of Everday Life, published in 1984, titled “ ‘Making Do’: Uses and Tactics” provided aspirant Tactical Media practitioners with theoretical flourishes and critical heft. Of particular interest was de Certeau’s distinction between “tactics” and strategies.” Divorced from de Certeau’s considerably dense text, the distinction between the two could be rendered: Tactics are the rapidly deployed practices of the guerilla, the immigrant, the powerless. They are the resort of the cultural consumer who has no place of her own. Strategies, meanwhile, are the domain of dominative institutional powers, of technical and scientific rationality. A key distinction here is that strategies enjoy dominion over a “propre,” which is best conceived of as a subordinating power over space (and time). Tactics, then, are always making incursions into “strategically” dominated areas. There they can momentarily disrupt strategic plans and/or carve out momentary autonomous space. Consequently, a tactical political project must be ephemeral. It must also think in terms of small units, not the large bodies, of, say, electoral politics. It is the sort of perspective which lends itself to concepts like Work Theft, of which de Certeau, indeed, is an advocate.