Often when one thinks of ‘radio’, one may see the figure of the transmission tower, sending out signals across the landscape, a monolith of signal, creating spheres of influence over a large space. But this is only the larger narrative of Transmission, that which has been forced upon us by corporate interests, state interests, all working within the restraints of the dominant corporation, or over the guidelines of the FCC. One may not think of it as such, but the electromagnetic spectrum is ‘real estate’. certain modes of communications belong to certain bands, certain content can only be distributed through specific channels, but really this is only the illusion of the Law. ‘Interference’ is an excuse made so that corporate and state interests can be disseminated to the largest demographic, its a question of control, not one of ecstatic freedom, where there can be a heterogeneous lot of content, each transmission a haeccity, bursting forth into the airwaves, dancing on venue that is everywhere that it can be received. That beautiful coupling, Brecht and Benjamin had their own thoughts in their time when radio was in its infancy, before it became disenchanted by monopolization.

“The crucial failing of this institution has been to perpetuate the fundamental separation between practitioners and the public, a separation that is at odds with its technological basis. A child can see that it is in the spirit of radio to put as many people as possible in front of a microphone on every possible occasion…” (Reflections on Radio)

The key phrase to locate here is ‘a separation that is at odds with its technological basis’. Radio transmission is rhizomatic. Brecht, a ardent ‘transceptionist’ believed that radio was to ‘bring one into a relationship instead of isolating him’. Implicit in the technology then, is this element of inclusion. This may remind one of Deleuze’s concept of the ‘refrain’, and maps perfectly unto the three aspects of it as well. And in microtransmission, there can be a source, but it is never its center, a signal is distributed across a nomos, but isn’t the only expression of the source. The source can come from anywhere—a transciever can both transmit and receive a signal. It is territorial, but it is not definite. Microtransmission can serve as the medium for transduction to occur, where its milieu can serve as a basis for another milieu, similar but never self-same, or radically different.

On the question of the micro-political, microtransmission would not be a forum, an axial point in which a molecular revolution would be possible, but would rather create a collective assemblage of enunciation, where transversal and transformations of subjectivities would reach a pitch speed. Microradio, Microtransmission is an assemblage, it is not a possibility, or an actuality, its activity is inherent in its techniological machinery. The best example of this would be Sandy Stone’s ‘Nano-cast Task Force’, a series of microtrancievers that were purposed for small communities without a means of assembly. This technology would create a rhizomatic self-healing network that is not contingent on an arborescent model of transmission (radio tower, etc), but rather takes each individual as a node in the network. This means that radio production would itself be molecular, that each node is the bridge for sending and recieving, for relaying a signal would only be limited by participation in what is also concieveably a passive process.

So what does this mean? We are in the precarious situation of hearing, and not listening—what is sent to us through the airwaves should really incite a Benjaminian encounter with the aural. Day by day when the spectrums open up, and then are auctioned off to corporations that use it to sell us even more stuff—isn’t it about time we take it back?

May 9, 2010

“We may draw some general conclusions on the nature of Assemblages from this. On a fist, horizontal axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, on of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a mechanic assemblage  of  bodies, of actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reaction to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation,  of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (D&G 88).

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Love and Line of Flight

Do you know what love is?

“When one person says to another, love the taste of whiskey on my lips like I love the gleam of madness in your eyes, what lines are they in the process of composing, or, on the contrary, making incompossible? Fitzgerald: “Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relations will tell you in good faith that it was my drinking that drove Zelda mad, and the other half would assure you that it was her madness that drove me to drink. Neither of these judgments means much of anything. These two groups of friends and relations would be unanimous in saying that each of us would have been much better off without the other. The irony is that we have never been more in love with each other in all of our lives. She loves the alcohol on my lips. I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.” “In the end, nothing really had much importance. We destroyed ourselves. But in all honesty, I never thought we destroyed each other.” Beautiful texts. All of the lines are there: the lines of family and friends, of all those who speak, explain, and psychoanalyze, assigning rights and wrongs, of the whole binary machine of the Couple, united or divided, in rigid segmentarity (50 percent). Then there is the line of supple segmentation, from which the alcoholic and the madwoman extract, as from a kiss on the lips and eyes, the multiplication of a double at the limit of what they can endure in their state and with the tacit understandings serving them as internal messages. Finally, there is a line of flight, all the more shared now that they are separated, or vice versa, each of them the clandestine of the other, a double all the more successful now that nothing has importance any longer, now that everything can begin anew, since they have been destroyed but not by each other. Nothing will enter memory, everything was on the lines, between the lines, in the AND that made one and the other  imperceptible, without disjunction or conjunction but only a line of flight forever in the process of being drawn, toward a new acceptance, the opposite of renunciation or resignation—a new happiness?” (D&G 206)

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Russia May 1945

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1923-2003 (and beyond)

“‘When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.’

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May 8, 1945:

“On the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)” (D&G 260).

“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between field, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies with organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (D&G 12).

The map is the key article used in warfare. The War Machine is separate from the states and operates on many different spaces that coalesce with the invention of the map.  The War Machine operates on the battle field according to lines of flight, plains of consistency, and on both segmented and striated lines.

“Chess is a game of the state, or of the court; the emperor of China played chess. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, nature and confrontation derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pan, a bishop a bishop. […] Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chass plaer or the game’s for of interiority” (D&G 352).

“Go [ABOVE RIGHT] pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third person function: “It” makes a move. […] Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to which it fulfills functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only). Chess is indeed a war, but an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, with a front, a rear, battles. But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy, whereas chess is a semiology. Finally, the space is not at all the same: in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. The nomos of Go against the State of chess, nomos against polis” (D&G 352-3).

Kriegspiel (PICTURED LEFT) operates on the same plane as go. They both posess the ability to operate as strategic element against and outside the state. While Kriegspeil does have set rule and pieces it operates under similar rules of engagement as Go. IN Kriegspiel armies must be able to communiate, out manouvear and surround the enemy. Go functions in a similar manner. In either case, the board represents the smooth space and articulation of a map where the battle takes place. The war machine can exist as a body on a smooth space position by longitude and latitude.

For an example I point to the sinking of the German Battleship Kripitz.

This is the naval map used in the attack on the Kripitz. The Kripitz was a crippling battleship that sailed off the coast of Norway it was sunk from the air by British RAF fighters.

The battle ship was located on a smooth space as a implement of the war machine. It’s presence can also be demonstrated through the map as D&G suggest. The name Kripitz carries a legend with it. The point on the map is the location where it was sunk. The ocean is a smooth space and the objects on it move on a line of flight. The plane that attacked it could also be said to move in a smooth space, but on a striated line. What is the difference between a plane and a ship?

The ship is a chess piece.

The plane is an object on the go board. In this case both are on the same plane of consistency. The same map.

The sinking of the German battleship Kripitz.

“The difference is that chess codes and decodes space, whereas Go precedes altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it (make the outside a territory in space; consolidate, adjacent territory by the construction of a second, adjacent territory; deterritorializing the enemy by shattering his territory from within; deterritorialize oneself by renouncing by going elsewhere…)” (D&G 352)

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2010: “Returned to its milieu of exteriority, the war machine is seen to be of another species, of another nature, of another origin. One would have to say that it is located between the two heads of the State, between the two articulations, and that it is necessary in order to pass from one to the other. But ‘between’ the two, in that instant, even ephemeral, if only a flash, it proclaims its own irreducibility. The State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution, one that will continually cause it problems” (355).

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