The Irritants of Empire: Rita Raley’s Tactical Media

What are the most effective forms of political activism in an era of neoliberal globalization, millennial capitalism, postindustrialism, social networking, and media ubiquity? This is the implicit question behind Rita Raley’s Tactical Media. If total revolution ever had been possible, Raley’s book suggests, it certainly isn’t now. Rather, in concordance with Michel Foucault’s statement that “there is no single locus of the Great Refusal” . . . but only “a plurality of resistances,”¹ Raley endorses the value of temporary disturbances and provocations—the hallmark of the eponymous “tactical media.”

“Tactical,” of course, borrows from Michel de Certeau’s well-known distinction between tactics and strategies in The Practice of Everyday Life. In Certeau’s formulation, the tactical action of consumers is more improvisational, playful, and responsive than the more schematic strategies, which are the province of producers. Though Raley resists Certeau’s binaristic alignment of strategies with producers and tactics with consumers, she clearly sanctions the modus operandi of tactical media practitioners and their form of political critique. Less oppositional (which would imply a more defined or coherent enemy than that provided by millennial capitalism) than parodic and playful, tactical media aim to unsettle, taunt, and disturb for their political effect, their interest lying in “open-ended questions rather than prepackaged lessons, instructions rather than products” (9). Reliant on emergent situations and chance, tactical media practitioners serve as the kairotic gadflies of the neoliberal regime.

Alongside more general categories like hacktivism (i.e., concerted, politically motivated cyber-attacks), clicktivism, or slacktivism (participating in online campaigns by organizations like Moveon.org), tactical media encompass such practices as TXTMobs, P2P network building, open source software, and modding (i.e., modifying hardware or software for purposes not originally intended by the designer). But at a slim 150 pages, Raley’s book is not simply a compendium of tactical media projects. She aims here to expand the category of tactical media beyond mere “tactical gizmology” (15) (the focus on technical interventions) to include projects like persuasive games and artistic data visualization—that is, the aesthetic as a tool for political critique. However, Raley writes, “This is more than Dadaist provocation . . . and not simply a variant of a radical art practice that endeavors to disrupt socio-political, economic, and cultural structures” (11). What defines her project (and tactical media more broadly) is its focus on disturbance of the symbolic: “In its most expansive articulation, tactical media signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (6).

Raley’s book consists of an introduction and three longish chapters: “Border Hacks,” “Virtual War,” and “Speculative Capital,” which deal with, respectively, tactical media responses in the form of persuasive games and hacktivism to anti-immigration policy, artistic response to U.S. military policy that relies on metaphors of war as a virtual game, and critical artistic visualizations of finance capital. Each of these sites was chosen for its relevance to the dominant neoliberal paradigm and what James Der Derian has dubbed MIME-Net, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network. While Raley includes a plethora of tactical media project examples, these serve mainly as occasions for critical reflection on neoliberalism. The book attempts to trace neoliberalism’s contours, assessing both the clever ways that it stymies or co-opts resistance, and pointing out how tactical media practitioners do manage to effect critique or resistance, contingent and temporary though these may be.

The types of projects Raley includes here range from those legitimated and funded by the art community (gallery installations like Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway’s Black Shoals: Stock Market Planetarium [2001], an artistic visualization of finance capital, and John Klima’s ecosystm [2001], an installation at the Whitney Museum that “gives capital a graphic quality and renders money as an aesthetic object” [117]) to those that partake...