The legacy of the globalisation protests and the politics of appropriation.
What to make of the fact that, when it comes to forms of protest, globalisation protests can easily be interpreted as both the arrival of the new and the return to the old? In one sense, the globalisation protests that have continuously erupted ever since Seattle have brought us decidedly new forms and formats of contestation. The people in the streets are no longer a mass, they are multitudes, and the dependence on mass media for the mediatisation of protest is being unsettled by radically distributed modes of independent reporting. From the standpoint of tactical media, however, the globalisation protests may also appear as a return to rather classic forms of antagonistic politics. As tactical media imply a distancing from the classic format of the demonstration, the globalisation movements seems to be very much about masses in the streets, and making headlines. Or is it that globalisation protests invite us to begin telling the story of tactical media anew?
For one thing, these events bring home the fact that in the current situation of media-based politics, all images, including those of protest, are intrinsically appropriatable. The rule that no image, slogan or sound is owned exclusively by any one agent, also applies to the images, slogans and sounds of protest. In fact, appropriation may well be the name of the game of antagonistic politics in the current media context. "`Who gets to define whom?" being what is at stake in this process. The globalisation protests, then, neither signal the return to old and familiar forms of antagonistic politics, nor do they signal the arrival of a pure and new emancipatory politics. Rather they introduce an impure politics, where the status of the claim put forward by protest, is not clear beforehand, but is still to be determined: and where the fight over the definition of the point made by protest, is an intrinsic part of the political struggle. This means that retaining a belief in the rift between mainstream and alternative media formats, is ill suited to address the situation of antagonistic media politics. So tactical media rather than being a synonym for "alternative media" is in fact situated at the intersections of mass and alternative media: in which alternative media are increasingly mobilized on the sites of big politics (summits), but simultaneously promote a move away from them (the distributed politics of the net).