Framing Tactical Media - Critical Art Ensemble

Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most�claiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin�most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s. To name but a few of these explanations: strategic political movements were in a valley period; postmodernist thought had connected the strategic to the repulsive category of the universal; after the fall of the Soviets, the global capitalist juggernaut appeared uncontestable, leaving immediate micro-subversion as the only effective option; or even the growing interest in developing new interdisciplinary research methods that encouraged dialogue among forces of knowledge production. The list goes on and is as varied as the individuals who drifted into tactical forms of production, unfortunately what was originally a long, diverse list of causalities will in all likelihood be shortened and homogenized.

Perhaps there are more immediate problems since bureaucratization and historicization are slow. First, rather than being refined into a pure consumable unit, TM is currently an unruly catch-all. To borrow from Naomi Klein, TM is the "alt.everything" of culture/politics. Tacticality is only one of the many currents of resistant possibility converging at a cultural/political vector of resistance that for lack of a better term is now called Tatical Media. Is anyone really surprised?"

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