Coté, Mark (2011) What is a media dispositif? Compositions with Bifo. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 35 (4). pp. 378-386. ISSN 0196-8599

Abstract

This article is a dialogue with the Italian autonomist media theorist Franco Berardi, also known as Bifo. The discussion turns on how to conceptually frame Italian experiments in media activism—from the pirate broadcaster Radio Alice to the networked microemissions of Teletreet. Throughout, special emphasis is put on the importance of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari to the creative wing of Italian autonomist thought which focused on media, communication, and culture. Thus “the Italian Foucault” is presented as an apposite conceptual persona. Finally, both the Foucault-inspired dispositif and the more autonomist composizione (elsewhere presented as either composition or recombination) are suggestions for better theorizing new networked organizational forms. Thus, media is presented as constitutive of the social body; that is, media is not understood as an additive with “effects” but as comprising and calibrating those constitutive elements, their affective, communicative, and signifying capacities.

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