(1) Ieva Gudaitytė & (2) Matteo Spanò
(1) Ieva Gudaitytė researches, writes, and hosts occasional radio shows on various independent community radio stations. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo with a focus on Ukrainian independent radio and music scene and its Eastern European networks.
(2) Matteo Spanò is a researcher and radio producer. His work focuses on experimental radio practice, visual and sound poetry, and the intersection between media culture and radical politics. He is co-founder of Cashmere Radio. He is currently a PhD student at the UdK - Sound Studies with a research project on Radio Alice and free radio culture.
Editors’ Comment: This contribution is part of a collaboration between Radical Creativities and Reset!
Collaborative performance between Independent Community Radio Network and James Prevett at Galleria Sculptor, Helsinki, by Ieva Černiauskaitė
“In the 21st-century radio as we have known it may disappear altogether...or, as an obsolete technology relegated to the subculture fringes, it may exist only in pirate form, a weapon of the world‘s underclasses; a tool for artists, revolutionaries, shamans, and other questioning voices in our brave new tech world.”
Jacki Apple,New American Radio and Radio Art
Here we are, in the 21st century, observing the small-scale independent radios springing up internationally to offer us a way to make sense of our sounding world through media today. The need to gather together in small-scale nooks and fringes of mass media to listen as a conscious citizen remains important―to mobilise across the translocal, rather than universally global; to share time and space with activist urgency yet with sustainable care. In this article, we try to outline the way this gathering is attempted: neither by revolutionaries nor shamans, but by questioning voices.
Subversions of the post-media era
In the later years of his life, psychoanalyst and philosopher Félix Guattari repeatedly referred to a socio-historical transition of exceptional proportions: the coming of the ‘post-media era’. Guattari provided an ambiguous sketch of this concept, from which we can nonetheless draw out its key features: first of all, post-media can be understood as post-mass-media, i.e. a condition in which the capillary diffusion and miniaturisation of communication technologies have ousted mass media from their technological supremacy and, more importantly, from their cultural hegemony. The distinction between different types of media would be overcome, as traditional media were reconfiguring themselves into a new transmedial format that would fit the needs of the network society (Guattari had foreshadowed the Internet revolution through the French experiment of the Minitel network, commercially introduced in 1982). Finally, the modality of media use and consumption in the ‘post-media era’ would change: from a strictly hierarchical/vertical mode (producer/transmitter to consumer/ receiver) to an osmotic/rhizomatic one.
Examples of this change had been emerging roughly since the completed transition to post- Fordism in the late 1970s: one case that had particularly concerned Guattari was the experience of free radio in Italy and France. Taking an active part in the experiences first of Radio Alice and later of Radio Tomate, Guattari had observed an alternative use of the radio medium, a use that subverted both its technical characteristics and its political implications; a use that effectively shuffled the existing hierarchies within the medium. In free radio, the transmitter/ receiver dynamic was subverted, i.e. diffused: by unfiltered phone- ins on the radio, and by physical participation in the broadcasts from its open studio, everyone couldbe simultaneously a producer and consumer of media, and perform both roles within the radio channel understood not as a top-down communication process but as an emergent performative situation. In the case of independent community radio, the user entering into a dual role of production and consumption is often the necessary condition for the existence of the medium itself, understood as a common resource to be shared and preserved collectively.
Minor turn, major implications
Today, however, it appears that the post-media transition optimistically envisioned by Guattari has taken a different turn, one that has brought social media to predominance. Tools for media production and consumption are easily and readily at hand for us at all times: we literally carry them in our pockets. Yet, our mode of presence within social media doesn’t quite look like the collective liberation that the network society was supposed to bring about. Our social media avatars do not emancipate us from determined identities and societal roles, but cast us back into them. We find ourselves disarticulated from the mass (without ever activating the possibility of reaching critical mass) but think, act and feel as part of a bigger organism with its own consciousness: the swarm (Berardi 2014, 165 ff.). We inhabit social media environments as if they were spaces of self-enfranchisement, while we become more entangled in the meshes of swarm personality and fail to recognize that these environments represent the most advanced systems of control by capitalist hegemony. But capital’s resilience depends on its ability to harness our collective imagination, reconfiguring its use to update and enhance the existing mediascape, thereby guaranteeing its endurance.
What happens, then, if our imagination is oriented not towards the new but the old, towards recuperating mechanisms that no longer serve the logic of control and power preservation, but can instead prove useful to trace the lines of flight outside of the swarm mind and towards an “ethical community of singularities” (Agamben 2021, 18) and a multitude of sense-makings? In order to follow this path, we attempt to sketch a different kind of media, one that stands at the antipodes of social media but - in a similar, and to some extent, specular way to social media - emerges out of the post-media transition. Such is minor media (Broeckmann, 1999), i.e. media that employ the strategy of “becoming-minor”, as initially outlined by Deleuze and Guattari (1986, 16 ff.), to “proliferate [...] to amplify, to recompose something that is no longer a totality, but that makes a former totality shift, de-totalises, de-territorialises an entity” (Guattari, 1995). In particular, we focus on independent radio as an example of minor media, one whose specific traits reside in the way it combines active listening practices with the ability to imagine community; we argue that this particular combination is an essential step towards the actual construction of community.
Minor public: communicating the common feeling
Guattari’s concepts exhibit themselves in ways comparable to counter-cultural or subcultural scenes; that is, by reclaiming social and cultural capital through the use of symbols and references outside the hegemonic discourse. This can be seen as one of the common resources that creates a new cultural imagination and a sense of personal belonging, acting both as a “destabilising agent” and a minor knowledge production mechanism. For independent radio, it is in the general tone of the broadcasts: playful subversion of traditional broadcasting roles, mutation and juxtaposition of radio formats, use of irony, nonsense, rambling, local accents and dialects to perform linguistic experiments outside classic, conservative, heteronormative radio speech. This future highlights the two elements of minor media performing to the minor public: subversion through a plurality (or anti-order), and a bottom-up way to form a mutual understanding within a collective (alternative knowledge). This poses a threat of creating an exclusive audience by “preaching to the converted”, which, in this case, are predominantly young, often university educated, urban international demographics with preexisting interest in alternative music cultures. At the same time, rather than being merely a stylistic strategy, it is also a way to practise left-leaning politics through references that rely on shared ideological stands (climate activism, feminism, anti-racism, etc.). While the idea of a cultural and activist crossover is not surprising, the move from a universal appeal to a more minor one is characteristic of independent radio. To create an attentive conversation alternative to the mass-produced culture, a sense of a common knowledge system― linguistic and symbolic―is first needed.
Communication, however, is not a simple tool; and listening to internally understood independent radio is not enough to articulate an alternative to mass culture. What challenges the hegemony is not only the socio-linguistic tools minor media employ to first form a minor public, but how these tools use emotion to diversify the conversation. If communal and small-scale radio activity keeps on reminding us of “the idea of listening as a public act, and the consequences that had for what it means to be a member of the public” (Lacey, 2013, 15), then the kind of public it forms also implies a broader world-making. Even if based on a reclaimed and internally shared set of meaning signifiers, radio is still a public or rather shared way of exchanging information (knowledge). Radio producers imagine their listeners and vice versa, making the content in between―whether within the show or the webchat―act as a certain local forum where a common status quo is discussed. In this world, emotion carries cultural and political connotations that Judith Butler has argued are performed through the use of language; historically a threat to logic (Butler, 1997). Hence, not only understanding each other but feeling together becomes a common resource shared through the radio. It becomes a subversive act against the seriousness of power: whether through fun, anger, or sorrow, emotion brings radio listeners and hosts together in a rhizomatic, fluid affective relationship to the world that Guattari has proposed.
Figuring out together, in the studio
In these processes, elements that create minor media and its minor audiences―shared understanding and emotion through listening― become steps to actually construct a media practice together through independent radio. What grounds them is a studio: a physical place that allows people to meet up, share their ideas and exhibit visions of socio-cultural life; a metaphoric yet real forum that translates to a more ambiguous sonic one through the broadcast. Common space blurs the line between the listener and the producer, removing the level of mediation that media by definition creates and offering an imagined belonging to the imperfect, yet real soundscape of the local radio station. It makes it less an intellectual, and much more a practical endeavour: through defining “local” not in the notions of national or ethnic borders, but in the lived ‘here’ and ‘now’; through the shared labour and responsibility of maintaining a place; through an inevitable compromise of collective management. Initially outlined concepts of pluralism, interdisciplinarity and de- totalisation are thus lived in an independent radio studio by working, arguing, and having fun on the air but also in a place.
Quoting Bickford, “listening is a constitutive element in the process of figuring out, in the face of conflict, what to do” (Bickford, 1996). While in a much less explicitly political context, this is what minor media can offer: a passionate conversation around a common vision of a small media culture world-making. A municipality, which, from the Latin munia (duties) and capere (to assume), well embodies the characteristics of this kind of medium and of its user. To assume duties of care and preservation of the medium is the smallest common denominator for a community that emerges around the medium’s own resources. At the same time, on a translocal level, (radio) municipalities become symbols and vehicles of a collective use-value movement that finds a myriad of different implementations and interpretations across the network society in its entirety. Finally, radio municipalities are there to be enjoyed―and maybe cause a little chaos.