The Promise of Post-Media
The post-mediatic revolution to come will have to be guided to an unprecedented degree by those minority groups which are still the only ones to have realized the mortal risk for humanity of questions such as: the nuclear arms race; world famine; irreversible ecological degradation; mass-mediatic pollution of collective subjectivities.19
Guattari had already learned in the 1980s how the free radio movement in France made extensive use of Minitel services to constitute groups of supporters and this cross-platform minoritarian resistance was one of his primary points of reference for post-media. This is perhaps why, as a supporter of free radios in France, he did not strongly criticise Minitel on the basis of its statist and centralised status. Indeed, he understood the potential of the user groups on Minitel as akin to the offline transdisciplinary groups he created and moved in. These minoritarian assemblages were the incubators for post-media subjectifications, as they plotted paths between the sirens of IWC and state cooptation. What really impressed him was the the extent to which ‘the promoters of these devices [like Minitel] had not foreseen the ‘‘indirect’’ uses which were to be made of them.’20 Dents in Guattari’s optimism were evident, and he wavered in his enthusiasm about post-media: one is forced to admit that there are very few objective indications of a shift away from oppressive mass-mediatic modernity toward some kind of more liberating post-media era in which subjective assemblages of self-reference might come into their own.21
Franco Berardi has helpfully suggested that the Free Radio experiments of the 1970s in Italy and during the ’80s in France in which both he and Guattari were involved were ‘a general rehearsal’ for the subversive resingularisations and destructuring of mass media that the web helped to bring to fruition.22 As Guattari explained: But the point the organizers of the popular free radio stations particularly emphasize is that the totality of technical and human means available must permit the establishment of a veritable feedback system between the auditors and the broadcast team: whether through direct intervention by phone, though opening ‘studio doors’, through interviews or programs based on listener-made cassettes, etc. […] We realize here that radio constitutes but one central element of a whole range of communication means […].23
20