Unfortunately, the district’s program is to be a public-private enterprise, sponsored by advertising by Clear Channel. This is the company that infamously censored artists such as Rage Against the Machine and the Dixie Chicks on their radio stations because they weren’t deemed patriotic enough after Sept. 11 or because of their criticisms of the Iraq war.

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That’s exactly what would happen in LA, but what an excellent idea. An excellent way to take control back into the power of the people.

I think the US gov’t (or any gov’t) is way more afraid of ideas like this than they are of people bombing things. The gov’t most fears radicalism that can bring people together and get people out of the haze of capitalism.

Browne

Thanks very much for your comments. I appreciate that. I don’t know when or how the word “recuperation” entered radical thought, but I’d be very interested to find out. … In general, I link the term with the eclipse of the progressive vision of history within radical thinking that occurred between the 1940s and 1960s, when militants starting imagining that they had to break out of history as opposed to expedite its development.

Do you remember the name of the Situationist article on “recuperation”? I’d like to check that out.

Personally I think the question of recuperation is important not because one can go beyond recuperation but precisely that is not possible. If something is beyond recuperation it also not worth struggling. So it’s not about self-referntiality or purity, but about finding avenues for political recomposition. This is incidentally what I’m writing about, or trying to, so I suspect you’ll be seeing my stuff sooner or later in your new role at AK (in fact Zach, Charles, and Lorna have my proposal now – I can send it you too if you’d like. I’d like to hear what you think, as you’ve always been great with commenting on writing in a helpful and constructively critical way).

Thanks very much for your comment on my post. I appreciate that.

It’s interesting that you use the term “recuperated,” which was not part of the left’s vocabulary prior to WWII and appears to have entered it around the time that the Provos went into action. For my sake, I have some doubts about its utility: for example, what would it mean for a group to be recuperated or not recuperated? To recoup is essentially “to restore” or “to recover” and the implication is that a recuperated group has been restored or recovered for the system (whereas one that is not recuperated is lost to it). I see the point, but I’m resistant to the idea that a group or individual could be “beyond” the system and, in fact, it seems to me that the most effective, penetrating revolutionary groups would need to be seen as part of the system (in the broader, social order sense) in so far as they express and act on its contradictions.

I think of the Provos’ self-dissolution as their attempt to maintain their own revolutionary integrity. I support that (of course) but their integrity or lack thereof is ultimately kind of beyond the point. I see why you raised this, but I think that there was something very self-referential about the Provos and the trend in radicalism that they represented.

In any case, I’m really glad that Autonomedia published Kempton’s book. It makes it much easier to open up some of these thorny questions about the history of the left.

Best,
Chuck

One of the most interesting things in the book is the idea that the Provos dissolved in order to avoid becoming recuperated / contained within ‘the system.” Of course this doesn’t mean that their demands can’t be anyways, as you point out.

The thing that raises for me, one of the things that I take most from autonomist political theory is that recuperation is not the exceptional case of how capitalism and the state develop, but rather its driving motor. So it’s no real surprise that such a dynamic exists, that radical demands don’t remain radical. The question that it raises for me is how to work through and around dynamics of recuperation without either taking that as the end of the possibility of radical politics or an excuse to avoid all forms of organization that are anything more than ephemeral. I don’t think the Provos answer this question, but they do provide some more interesting fodder for thinking through that sort of question, which remains an open one.