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5

Postmediatic Affect

The Italian radio movement, and particularly the experiment of Radio

Alice, which expressed a Dadaist, schizo impulse, had an influence on

the start of the Parisian free radios, and Félix was very active in that

history. In France, the free radios had an even greater disruptive

meaning, if that was at all possible, than in Italy. The traditional State

centralization in France reacted with great suspicion to the blossoming

of a multiplicity of voices and, for the first time, minority and under-

ground cultures were able to have a voice. Radio Soleil broadcast music

from the Maghreb, and Radio Tomate reported the ecological battles

and the occupation of houses by young proletarians in the Parisian

suburbs.

In 1977, there appeared the French edition of the small book Alice is

the Devil, Free Radio Alice(Alice è il diavolo – Radio Alice Radio Libre), and

Félix wrote its preface, entitled ‘Des millions et millions d’Alice en

puissance’ (‘Millions and Millions of Potential Alices’). In the radio

experiences, Félix saw the proliferation process of enunciative agencies

destined to cause the explosion of the mass-media model. When Félix

died at the beginning of the 1990s, the fever of the World Wide Web

had just begun that would, in the following years, transform the global

communication system, introducing a rhizomatic notion that eroded

the centralistic principle of the twentieth-century mediatic system.

Conceptually, the free radio movement had anticipated the post-

mediatic tendency that the Internet is today bringing to maturity.

*******

Guattari had always played fearlessly with technology, yet he person-

ally did not use a typewriter and wrote with a cheap ball-point pen

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