Ligna

What is the future of the political movement?

Discussion rounds, demonstrations, reading circles, proclamations – by the 1990s at the latest, conventional forms of extra-parliamentary political manifestation have been in crisis.

A new science of action was called for, which it was hoped would produce other forms of political information and intervention: In conveying political knowledge, how can work be performed simultaneously on the constitution of new publics, instead of assuming a critical public as a given? How can transmitter-recipient models be differentiated? How can the transfer of knowledge be bound to the creation of an experimental space to produce a continuum between theory and practice?

The Radioballett – choreographies of dispersion

By developing the Radioballett, the Ligna group has found a new form of political movement that answers these questions. In it, a radio programme moves its listeners through the public sphere.

What they hear is a mélange of theoretical reflection, political audio guide and choreographic instruction. The result is a kind of congregation that cannot be stopped by the new prohibitions on assembly to protect city commerce and the privatised zones – because people are not gathering but dispersing.

And it is precisely this dispersal that produces the effect behind the Radioballet’s actions, because the outsider sees nothing but a sequence of distributed small groups and individuals eerily performing the same movements more or less simultaneously. The concentrated quiet of this constellation enables actions to be performed that would otherwise be impossible.

They are not strategic attacks executed with military precision, however, but micro-actions – displacing everyday practices in which priority is given to a return of the suppressed: to excluded groups and gestures, suppressed history and repressed dreams.

Modernism renewed instead of trendiness

If the latest “trend research” is to be believed, the “social swarm” and the “smart mob” are the future of the political movement, the essence of the collective action indeed. It does not take much to momentarily predict a shift in politics from the large marketplaces of representative politics to a multitude of local forums and networked initiatives, in which a fast and efficient perception of options for action replaces the tough and laborious constancy of the assembly.

Small informal or semi-formal groups appear to be faster and more flexible in their loose association than the traditional institutional organizational forms. That’s because the consensus “smart mobs” imply with regard to certain concrete orientations is not the result of integration into a unit(y) and its representation. It works on accord of the mere fact of individual cooperation at a given time and place.

At first glance, the Radioballett could be held for just such a “swarm” or “smart mob”. But the Lignas are not trendy, they are radical modernists. They have found this new political form of movement in dealing with a medium that understands networking in a different way from the “new media hype”.

“Transforming the distribution machine into a communication machine,” this old demand of Bertold Brecht’s, is currently seen in the context of the Internet, which replaces the asymmetric mass media radio and TV with new interactive forms. But Ligna (and perhaps Brecht too) are concerned with addressing the radio listeners exactly in a situation where they are separated and isolated. They maintain that the unutilised political potential of the mass medium is more in the fact that it reaches people in the state of a radical separation.

The Radioballet attempts to grasp this separation as distance and this distance as a free space to move in, in which listening is perceived as active participation in distribution, as a production of and in distribution.

The political effectiveness of having a good time

In this sense, the dispersal produced by the Radioballet is also a diversion in the sense of entertainment: Instead of being (inter)activists in the emphatic sense, the participants in the Radioballett practise the art of lingering and passing time: the art of having a good time.

Instead of plucking people from their passivity and isolation in the sense of being strong in a group, the Radioballett transfers the modern isolation per se into a figure of political collectivisation. And so the Radioballett is at the same time a Marxist criticism of the inter-activism of the social swarm, which has achieved the status of a new ideological pragmatism in neo-liberal discourse.

Uncanny tranformations of media

That would be reason enough to accord the Lignas the title “movement experts”. But questioning them on the future has yet another point: the eerie character of the Radioballet is no coincidence, but points to a very special school of analysis grounded in media theory.

This analysis assumes that media are never simple instruments for issues existing independently of them. Instead, media in differentiation to other media are gradually forming their own social and technical worlds. Because every new medium combines new methods in processing and relating bodies/material and symbols to each other, changes in media in this relationship always engender uncertainty.

Thus changes in media are closely associated with the topos of the uncanny: in dealing with new media, new occult practices are invariably produced too, which may be trickery and madness, but can also be interpreted as a serious attempt to come to terms with the still unknown potential of the new medium in question, his time and world. It is no accident that a “medium” could naturally be a person in communication with another world and time and for this reason, finally, can see into the future.

A “material astrology”

It is not widely know that in the course of the Radioballett’s gradual development, Ligna have several times dealt with transforming occult practices into experimental layouts based on media theory, for example, at the close of their “taped voices” research, which developed the “wireless with the dead” from the static of a radio.

Against this backdrop, Ligna’s manifesto for the Prognoses on Movement(s) – that the Radioballett seeks to establish a new form of “material astrology” that interprets the dispersal of listening to the radio in the public arena as constellations – becomes plausible.

In contrast to the “smart mob”, the Radioballett does not laud itself as the future of political movement, but becomes an experimental set-up primarily aimed at testing a collective form of predicting political movements.