Counter-information

The era of communication, an expression that contributes to the already long list of cliches surrounding us in any society, a combination of words that reflects primarily the globalized world, identical to many other expressions that we adapted in our everyday use as a pattern, as a parasite word, without even thinking of the conditions and context in which they were generated. Even in Moldova is possible to hear the people on the street pronouncing these words. And we go on with our lives, we continue to use them, we are not even interested to stop for a while, to take time to think, we pass away and le langue du bois overpasses our existence leaving unchanged our lives and the lives of our children, making us obedient.

Still, what is communication?
Is it the same if related to information and its transmission?
Why there is so much speculation about it?
What’s its relation to the power and its political implications?
How does it change our lives if not improves and what can we do about it?

We could say that communication incorporates the information that represent its content. It is the act of transmission of information. According to Gilles Deleuze communication and transmission is a propaganda of information as of a number of words ordered in a certain way, being representative for the society of control and here, I believe, he speaks of communication as of one way transmission. According to him «informer, c'est fair circuler un mot d'ordre», in the absence of which there cannot be neither information, nor communication as such.
On the other hand the era of communication is first of all the era of development of informational technologies, when the accent is put on how the information is spread around and on the speed it reaches the target group as well as on the quality of transmission – a huge investment of ressources to generate a light speed development adapted to the consumerist societies' needs and order and on the other hand regularly upgraded to a powerful tool of control.
The conference at which Deleuze presented his speach took place on 17 of March 1987 at FEMIS (La fémis, école nationale supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son, Paris). Since then our way of living had transformed to a great extend, particularly due to the development of communication technologies. One thing Deleuze didn't take into account was the development of Internet as of an interactive tool allowing the feedback in real time. This means that the radical change proposed by Internet technologies, if compared to television or radio, consists in switching from one way transmission to two and more ways allowing the process of communication to become a real-time debate. This new dimension of communication gave birth to the possibility of counter-attacking ones communication transmited, which action Deleuze defined in his time as «contre-information», the content of which can be reapplied today. The specificity of the counter-information, according to him also, is that it becomes effective just in the moment when it transforms itself into an act of resistance and here we could mention as example just a few lists among numerous mailing lists developed by different actors in multiple domains who proposed themselves to follow and analize different types of communicated information, starting with the official discources circulating on national and international levels and finishing with a chatroom of a group of adolescents debating on pop music.

But is it possible to say that all of these forums and platforms are necessarily effective and in which cases could we define a counter-information as representing an act of resistance? Only in cases when the debates in those virtual rooms question the power and authority and the legacy of taken decisions that affect all of us.
Thus, with few exceptions that reapropriate the format of the letter like mail art is, the counter-information is used as an act of negation of ones communication by replacing it with another, as an expression of individuality, of subjectivity and our right to it.

The whole story of communication and counter-information, which Deleuze finally doesn't associate in any way with the art work, helped him to pass to the work of art as an act of resistance. And if art for Deleuze is something that resists in time, then the resistance of counter-information (on the contrary to negation) owns something to the art world as well.
And it is not about the activist type of the artists who are appropriating mass-media tools in order to propulsate their messages but around the ones that generate new mediums in order to communicate with the means of art, that often are themselves a medium active on the edge of visibility in their neighbourhood environements.

Finally I would say that all of 3 notions: act of resistance, art and counter-information overlap each other, nurture each other, and thus represent partially each other; They share a common space being unseparable from the society.

USV

Gilles DELEUZE, Qu'est-ce que l'act de création?, retranscripted text by Charles TESSON with the agreement of DELEUZE of the filmed conference that took place on 17 of March 1987 at La fémis, école nationale supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son, Paris, published under the title Avoir une idée en cinéma (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Aigremont, Editions Antigone, 1989, p. 63-77)

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