AUTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: In the Beginning
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 02/23/2004 09:08:23 PM
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LH prompted me today to start this weblog, a narrative of the project "The
Public Square" I am undertaking this spring. Please comment on it as it
unfolds.
The project attempts to constitute 'the public sphere' in both discursive
and spatial senses during three weeks in the Spring in 2004. Because
this project has synthesized many different but related inquiries I've
undertaken over the last few years, updating readers of this weblog will
be a multi-part task. This first entry will attempt to describe the project
and its genealogy.
The absence of the "public sphere" in contemporary life has
been much lamented by theorists from the first quarter of the last century
to today. While some, such as Jurgen Habermas, contend that such a sphere
once existed and has been despoiled by consumer capital, others contend
that the management of exclusion from meaningful public engagement has
merely shifted. Regardless, most individuals, regardless of political
ideology, may agree that opportunities for public engagement are limited
and spaces for debate about the social policies and cultural conditions
that shape our lives nary to be found. This project attempts both to
draw attention to this absences and suggest ways in which individuals
might correct it.
Briefly, the project mirrors two physical public spaces: an art museum
operated by a public university (an institution in which I participate
by virtue of being a graduate student in an art program) and a set of
temporary space that are 'public' by virtue of being publicly owned or
operated or by being places (perhaps privately owned) in which people
move in ways that seem more or less unrestricted. An example of such
a place might be a church, a parking lot, or a shopping mall. For the
three-week duration of the museum exhibition, temporary participatory
events will occur in public spaces around the city, activating them and
challenging implicit or explicit limits to engagement set up by those
who monitor, manage, or control those spaces. The spectatorship, privilege,
and permanence of the public museum contrasts with the participation,
populism, and temporality of the 'floating' public spaces. This contast
is drawn out by broadcasting what occurs in those spaces via low power
FM radio, both to each space and to a general radio audience. The public
airwaves constitute a third 'public square' of the project (non-participatory,
not permitted, impermanent), which is in turn mirrored by webspace (a
weblog and web archive) that constitute a fourth public square, one which
is participatory, permitted, and permanent.
What are the roots of this project? I've been involved in media activism for
a number of years, most concretely through involvement in the Urbana-Champaign
Independent Media Center (www.ucimc.org), with the intention to foster more
directly participatory forms of media production. I've read a great deal
of political and cultural theory about public space and democracy. I've been
in art school. This project offers me an opportunity to bring pieces of the
conversations that happen in each of those fields together. It is not important
for me that this project be seen as media making, political criticism, or
art per se, but each of those traditions offer points of entry to the project
and frames for critique, but none of them is complete unto itself.
For the last few years, my artwork (which can be viewed and heard at www.readysubjects.org)
has concerned itself with questions of the production of patriotism, citizenship,
and the spaces in which they unfold. This project is an extension of these
inquiries on a scale that is often quite daunting to me. It is the first
foray into the world of collaboration, and one of the more public projects
I've undertaken. Not infrequently, I'm afraid it won't work.
In November of 2003, I was fortunate enough to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina
for the purpose of presenting my video work at the Centro Cultural Rosa Luxembourg.
That trip affected me more than I realized at the time and provided much
of the inspiration for this project. During the financial crisis and popular
uprising of December, 2001, Argentinians began spontaneously assembling on
streetcorners and in reclaimed buildings (often banks--the irony of which
delights the participants) to meet their immediate needs, to debate politics,
to build community. Two years later, many of these "assambleas," as
they are known, no longer exist, others continue to provide food and shelter
for indigent families in their neighborhoods, and some struggle to understand
their function as social or political groups without a clear role in an economy
and political culture that has returned in many ways to neoliberalism. My
interest in this form of social organization is not born of naive or appropriative
idealization but in an appreciation of the tradition of self-rule, the claiming
of public space and public discourse, and the aesthetics of spontaneity of
which the assambleas are but one continuation.
My visit to Argentina prompted me to investigate the tradition of spontaneous
organizing and popular discussion in the United States. I looked with
a critical eye into the Chautauqua movement, the Wobblies, the Ferrer
Modern School, etc. These movements each provided important moments in
the history of popular education and public participation that eventually
failed, whether through commodification brought about by rootedness in
bourgeois values (Chautauqua), repression and an anti-institutional ideology
(Wobblies), or internal dischord and disorganization (Ferrer School).
At the same time, I was working on the written component of my mfa thesis,
which traces and evaluates de-spatialized forms of cultural resistance
in response to the de-materialization of capital and the privatization
of space. The tensions between spatialized and discursive opposition,
permanent and temporary institutions emerged as key threads linking contemporary
oppositional art and cultural activism to earlier forms of resistance
(or, in the case of Chautauqua, reform). I began to think about ways
to overcome the limitations of spatialized opposition with discursive
(or 'viral') resistance without ignoring the important ways in which
oppression continues to be spatialized and discourse (especially that
achieved through technology) continues to be striated along lines of
class, race, and education.
UTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: why low power radio?
STATUS: Publish
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DATE: 02/26/2004 11:29:14 AM
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I presented this project to students at the School for Designing a Society
(www.designingsociety.org) on Monday. One woman asked me why I was interested
in using low-power radio, rather than community radio. I read into her question
a unstated concern about the 'pirate' part of pirate radio. In the extreme,
this attitude can be a willful disregard or even snubbing of the hard work
or community organizations in favor of a swaggering go-it-alone individualism
that is, despite political differences, uneasily close to Bush's own mythology
of action-hero than it is to collective social and political organization.
There ae a number of reasons why pirate broadcasters (I actually prefer the
term 'unlicensed broadcasters') are overwhelmingly men, and not only due to
the gendered inequities of technical know-how, disposable income, and leisure
time. The term 'pirate' itself brings a particularly raced and gendered image
to mind, linked to mythologies of the outlaw, the bad "boy," and
the western.
Given this history and this language, I understand her concern about bypassing
community radio. But that mythology is not the one I'm seeking to deploy.
The illicit nature of the unlicensed low power radio is key to this project.
The project's conceptual square is drawn around deals the passage from permitted
to non-permitted occupations of public space to spark questions about how
boundaries between permitted and not permitted are drawn, by whom, and for
what purposes. I also believe that, despite the problematic nature of some
pirate radio mythologies, more voices and more anarchically democratic use
of public space are necessary to ensuring contestational and agonistic encounters
among political subjects, rather than consuming subjects (more on this in
another post). Finally, many activists have devoted countless hours and years
to the issue of licenscing low power radio so to further democratize the
legal spectrum, and this project seeks to raise awareness of their work and
the issues they are facing today.
We have a wonderful community radio station in Champaign-Urbana, WEFT 90.1
FM (www.weftfm.org), and I have been a moral supporter, financial contributor,
and not infrequent guest or producer for the station for almost five years.
I hope very much that some of the audio from this project will make its way
to WEFT in the future. As open as WEFT's format is, much of the sound from
this project is likely to be too off-beat or too raw for even them, which is
why I hope to make edited versions available to the station at a later date.
Below is some information on the low-power radio campaign from The Free
Press:
A brief history of Low Power FM:
In 1999, media activists convinced the FCC of the need for low power FM broadcasting:
10 to 100 watt, nonprofit neighborhood radio stations with a each of only
a few miles. No sooner was a nationwide service implemented than large commercial
interests used their massive lobbying power to place limitations on it, claiming
that low power FM transmissions would result in an unremitting "ocean
of interference" with existing stations. Industry's efforts, spearheaded
by the National Association of Broadcasters, culminated in the successful
passage of the Radio Preservation Act of 2000. Severe restrictions on where
low power stations could exist on the dial ensured that community broadcasters
would exist only in the most remote of rural locales. It also demanded an
official study on potential interference issues, economic impact assessments,
and a collection of public comment with a full FCC report to Congress - all
amounting to a disingenuous stall tactic.
The Congressionally-mandated study was completed earlier last year.
It unequivocally found the NAB's claims of interference to be bogus.
Public interest groups including Free Press commissioned additional research
to defend the report and to file comments with the FCC reiterating its
findings. On Friday, February 20, these efforts paid off when the FCC
released its recommendations to Congress, agreeing with public interest
advocates that industry claims of interference were patently false. They
called for the lifting of the stringent industry-sponsored restrictions
on low power broadcasting.
Now it is up to Congress to act on the FCC's recommendations. This will
clear the way for hundreds - if not thousands - of communities to begin
broadcasting locally-originated content. While the fight in Congress
remains, thanks to public outcry over the FCC's actions last summer,
many in Congress are eager to pass legislation that represents a positive
step towards encouraging localism and diversity on our airwaves.
Free Press
866-666-1533
www.mediareform.net
info@mediareform.net |