Urban Guerrillas on Film: Mediatization, Guerrilla Filmmaking, and Guerrilla Seeing in Emile de Antonio’s Underground

This article theorizes the form and function of subversive cinematic practices where the political economy of media and tactical media overlap. I am expressly interested in the political dimensions of guerrilla filmmaking and its implications for media’s power and use in contemporary American contexts. This does not signal, however, an expressed interest in Twitter revolutions, Occupy Wall Street, or any other technologically mediated political event such as these. This article, rather, intervenes theoretically prior to the articulation of these events and questions the conceptual ground from which events like these are understood.

I dialogue with the work of two primary figures, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, but fundamentally question their recent incursions into the development and deployment of tactical media. I treat their work not as a guide or manifesto for revolutionary action but as an archive of figures and set heuristic devices for framing political thought and action. The speculative and mutable qualities of their work inform this treatment of it. Here, however, I am expressly interested in three figures in particular: the multitude, the urban guerrilla, and the mediatized.

The multitude, the pair’s primary figure, mutates across the trilogy, eliciting a horde of revolutionary characteristics that range from a so-called “maximum plurality of singularities” to a networked body of technologically mediated social relations. In Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri recuperate the figure of the urban guerrilla, citing the work of the Black Panther Party, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades, in order to situate it as a historical precursor to the figure of the multitude, both organizationally and politically. Beyond the trilogy, Hardt and Negri name and theorize four emergent subjectivities in their 2012 Declaration: “the indebted,” “the mediatized,” “the securitized,” and “the represented.”¹ In some ways, these emergent figures are theorized as a more historically contingent multitude—a kind of multitude 2.0, if you will. In others, these figures offer yet untheorized access points into the constitution of political subjectivity and resistance in the contemporary moment.

In exploring the archive of figures and tactical possibilities that Hardt and Negri offer, then, the focus of this article rests on determining the possible lineage in the pair’s work that extends from the figure of the urban guerrilla, to the multitude, to the figure of the mediatized. To be sure, this is not a neat genealogy of figures and tactics. Neither do I give equal consideration to each figure that Hardt and Negri present. Rather, this article recasts the constituent forces attributed to these figures by examining a narrow set of aesthetic interventions in political discourse. As such, this article performs two primary interventions.

The first intervention in this article is a theoretical reframing of Hardt and Negri’s concept of mediatization. As I demonstrate below, the tension between repressive and liberatory forces that media elicits requires further clarification and particularity more than what Hardt and Negri offer. As such, I turn to the work of two thinkers and two concepts in particular, Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect” and William Haver’s “guerrilla seeing.” In his 2010 Post-Cinematic Affect, Shaviro links questions concerning ontological production and the ontology of media. Here, the “post-cinematic” is at once a description of cinematic practices that incorporate new media and a deindividualizing media economy that rearticulates lived experience. At a remove from classical film theory inquiring after the ontology of the moving image—how the moving image differs fundamentally from the still image, for example—Shaviro turns to film and media’s affective potential to reposition the ontological question.

Haver’s concept of “guerrilla seeing” furthers this theoretical trajectory. Following the work of Jean Genet, Haver focuses on questions of perception and subjective constitution from a position of total resistance to capital and state power. What Haver calls guerrilla seeing, then, draws out the political dimensions of the deindividualizing and depersonalizing media economy that Shaviro describes by theorizing the particularity of guerrilla struggle. It must be underscored at the outset that this mode of...