Re: <nettime> a graceful exit

[Imaginary Museum projects Tjebbe van Tijen via UPC <t.tijen@upcmail.nl>]

After considering these and other options, and trying to imagine how
we could 'upgrade' nettime's creaky infrastructure so that it'd at
least have a chance, we've reluctantly come to the conclusion that it
would be better to make a graceful exit. 

It made me think back to a book that resides on one of the book shelves in my house 

De l?autodissolution des avant-gardes
?ditions Galil?e en 1980

The references of this study are mostly French, but the subject matter is of course international and local everywhere
http://archivesautonomies.org/spip.php?rubrique64


Manifestes d?autodissolution des avant-gardes [1] :
	? 1 - Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1871
	? 2 - Premi?re Internationale, Philadelphie, 1876
	? 3 - Ecole symboliste, Paris, 1891
	? 4 - Groupe de l?Abbaye de Cr?teil, 1908
	? 5 - Deuxi?me Internationale, 1914
	? 6 - Groupe de Zimmerwald, Moscou, 1919
	? 7 - Dada, 1921 et 1922
	? 8 - Dada, 1923
	? 9 - Groupe "R?volution", Allemagne, 1923
	? 10 - Troisi?me Internationale, 1943
	? 11 - Arguments I, 1962
	? 12 - Arguments II, 1962
	? 13 - Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1967
	? 14 - B.A.P.U. de Strasbourg, 1967
	? 15 - U.N.E.F., 1967
	? 16 - Surr?alisme, 1969
	? 17 - Internationale situationniste, 1971
	? 18 - Groupe "Oser lutter", Paris, 1972
	? 19 - Librairie "La Vieille Taupe", 1972
	? 20 - Gauche prol?tarienne, 1973
	? 21 - Echanges et dialogues, Paris, 1975
	? 22 - Actuel, 1975
	? 23 - Fondation Brigitte-Bardot, 1976
	? 24 - M.L.A.C., Aix-en-Provence, 1976
	? 25 - Section du XVIIe Art de Paris de la L.C.R., 1977
	? 26 - Syndicat d??leveurs du Charolais, 1977
	? 27 - H?pital psychiatrique de Triestre, 1977
	? 28 - Politique-Hebdo, 1978
	? 29 - Sex Pistols, 1978
	? 30 - Th??tre Mouffetard, 1978
	? 31 - L?ordinaire du psychanaliste, 1978
	? 32 - Les cahiers du Grif, Bruxelles, 1978
	? 33 - Antirouille, 1979
	? 34 - Biocoop de Rambouillet, 1979
	? 35 - C.E.P.R.E.G., Paris, 1979
	? 36 - Ecole freudienne de Paris, 1980
	? 37 - Avant-gardisme, Panderma, 1958
	? 38 - Ligue des communistes, Engels, 1885
	? 39 - Eglise romaine, Hans K?ng, 1967
	? 40 - Etat fran?ais, Bakounine, 1871

Autres manifestes d?autodissolution :
	? 41 - Section carr?ment anti-Le Pen/R?seau d??tude, de Formation et de Lutte contre l?Extr?me droite et la X?nophobie (SCALP-Reflex), Janvier 2013
	? 42 - Non Fides, Novembre 2009
	? 43 - Indymedia Paris, Novembre 2014
	? 44 - Organisation Libertaire et Sociale, D?cembre 2014

"Bien de se retrouver ensemble" (( so nettime finds itself in good company as a movement is a means to something and not an end in itself

Let me note that the Dutch Provo movement of the mid-sixties dissolved itself in the summer of 1967
that I remember having assisted at several auto-dissolutions like one of the very early squatters organisations in Amsterdam 'Woningburo de Kraker' (1968-1969) and the Aktiegroep Nieuwmarkt (1970-1976), the last one with a real manifesto, I just check and on a state sponsored web-site (het geheugenvannederland/the memoryofthenetherlands) one can still find that manifesto:

http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl/?/nl/items/NAGO02:IISG-30051002734751/

What does it say: 

"OPGEHEVEN?
al sinds enige tijd door omstandigheden/
AKTIEGROEP NIEUWMARKT/
als het er om gaat dat wij ons eigen leven bepalen, inplaats van geleefd te worden, dan moeten wij niet koste wat kost groepen in stand houden, als de omstandigheden waaruit die groepen zijn voortgekomen, gewijzigd zijn. Het gaat om de beweging niet om de groep.
VOORTGEZET/
is de aktie: in en rondom de Nieuwmarktbuurt zijn vele gebouwen en woningen bezet, zelf zijn ingrijpende verbouwingen ter hand genomen, muren zijn gemetseld, leiding gelegd, enz.
BEDREIGD
voelen zich de autoriteiten die de heersende wanorde in stand willen houden... "

DISSOLVED
already for some time because of circumstances
ACTION GROUP NIEUWMARKT (a neighbourhood in the inner town of Amsterdam where there was fierce resistance against demolition of (squatted) and other houses for a new subway system in the early seventies)
when we opt for controlling our own lives in stead of being lived, we must not at all cost preserve groups, when the circumstances from which these groups has risen, have changed. It is about the movement, not about the group.
CONTINUED
the actio: in and around the Nieuwmarkt neighbourhood many buildings and houses are squatted, serious reconstructions have been taken to hand, waal have been laid, cables fixed, etc.
THREATENED
are those authorities that try to keep the disorder they produce in tact...?

What we did at that time was dissolve an action group that had to confront a major challenge over several years (ending in a series of eviction that involved over one thousand of police troops with all kinds of gear)... militancy had been on the order of the day... and once the main confrontation was over we felt it was necessary to liquidate the structures that had grown in what in teh end was a real 'battle' (though Amsterdam style, nobody died in it).

Nettime is of course an entity that I do not want to compare directly with what is described before... still the circumstances of it coming into existence do have changed and waht was 'tactical media' for a cause that felt to be worthwhile at that time - twenty years ago - has long be recuperated by now.

Nettime needs to move from 'the actual' to 'the historical'.

When we compare one of the triggering events in 1990 - the amateur video captured of a police beat-up of a black man, Rodney King in Los Angeles, that reached a national and international audience through distribution over the internet and mirrored in main stream media as well - with the interplay of 'social media' and 'mainstream media' like recently in Baltimore building up into a revolt against another police aggression against blacks, the idea of 'tactical media' as expressed during a series of conferences under the name Next 5 Minutes, do no longer apply. 

[see my rendering of the Baltimore revolt: "iPHONE AGE > iSTONE AGE phone & stone as tactical media from 1965 Watts to Baltimore Rebellion 2015"
https://www.flickr.com/photos/7141213@N04/17093712617/ ]

In my view the 'old style' newsgroup format of nettime that has been kept strictly over twenty years, banning all direct use of images and other media to be included in messages and debates, have been both a power of simplicity and a weakness that gave too much value to textual arguments (fitting very well in the academia exercise to write about images without showing them]. 

There was & is a limit to ekphrasis (from the Greek description of a work of art, possibly imaginary, produced as a rhetorical exercise).

As for the future of a well appreciated circle of communicators, please do make several archives, that rest a several digital deposit sites.

It is because of the diaspora of information carrier and not because of their centralisation that the information they carry has survived. This is even more so for the versatile but most fragile form of information carriers that reside only on digital carriers.

How could we thank Ted Byfield and Felix Stadler for their dedication during so many years?

To keep it available for all of use who engaged in it and for next generation who might be willing at some odd moment in time to peruse the stream of tactical nettime messages left behind.

If I can be of service to make that real... please feel free and contact me

Tjebbe van Tijen

7/5/2015


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org