ization. No question here of aleatory neo-liberalism with its fanat-
icism for the market economy, for a univocal market, for a market
of redundancies of capitalist power. (Chaosmosis, 117)For Guattari, the free radios were a general rehearsal for the emer-
gence of these resingularizing vectors, of these attractors of social cre-
ativity. And in fact, in reflecting on this phenomenon twenty years
later, we see very clearly that the free radios were an anticipation of the
Internet model now representing the incarnation of what Félix called
post-mediatic civilization. The experience of the free radios (and parti-
cularly of Radio Alice, which from start to finish expressed the aware-
ness of specific techno-mediatic linkages represented by radio in its
continual interaction with listeners) anticipated a process of techno-
communicative self-organization prefiguring the end of the mediatic
era. This awareness made Guattari a precursor of libertarian cyber-
culture.
Pressed by the diffusion of electronic communication technologies
and, in particular, the Minitel experience that became prevalent in
France during the early 1980s and represented the first example of a
European telematic network, Félix managed to speak about the post-
mediatic civilization starting to appear on the horizon. This would be a
civilization in which communication flows are no longer directed from
above toward a passive public and instead function as the densest
framework for rhizomatic exchange through emitters situated on the
same plane.
‘The police got rid of Alice – its perpetrators were pursued,
condemned and imprisoned, and its premises ransacked – but its
work of revolutionary de-territorialization still goes on unabated,
even affecting the nerves of the opposition,’ Guattari wrote in the
introduction to Radio Alice Radio Libre(‘Des millions et millions ...’,
241).
Radio Alice can be considered as the first experiment of deterritorial-
ization of the telecommunication system, and of attack against the cen-
tralized media system.
Thanks to the free radios it was possible to understand for the first
time a principle that the Internet has today propagated: the networked
diffusion of communication is the privileged plane of social self-
organization.
This seems to me the meaning of Guattari’s words: Radio Alice was
not an instrument of information, but a device for destructuring the
media system, the trigger for a destructuring of the social nervousPostmediatic Affect 319780230_221192_06_cha05.pdf 10/3/08 11:34 AM Page 31