Radical media, politics and culture.

"The Ong's Hat Mystery Revealed"

An Interview with Joseph Matheny

"The Incunabula catalog is a culture jam, created by culture jammers. There is no 'group' that existed previous to 1987, at least not as described in the brochure. 4 people got together in the 80s and 90s and put those documents together. NONE preceded their existence. However, many legends and synchronicities have occurred since. That is beautiful and indicative of a responsive universe."


Full story: http://newworlddisorder.ca"

"All Aboard the Black Magic Bus!"

Adam Gorightly


"Dean nodded in approval, and had his friend put the gun away and leave the house. Manson then handed the portly and balding preacher a tab of acid. 'Here, this will keep your blood pressure down.' Dean paused, gave the pill a blank look, and downed it with a sip of soda. Then he began where he'd left off, telling Charlie what his life was going to be like after he was condemned to Hell for 'doing' his lovely young daughter. After awhile -- as the acid started to take hold -- Morehouse began to mellow out, and reconsider his position. Charlie advised Dean that he might want to get in his friend's car and go home, and Dean agreed to this suggestion. When he came looking for Charlie again a few weeks later, it wasn't for his daughter's sake, but because he was in search of more acid. Charlie had revealed to Dean 'The Way of the Bus', and The Way was Psychedelic. Like many another spiritual searcher from the spaced-out 60's, LSD had opened Morehouse's mind, but unfortunately the vacuum between his ears was soon to be filled with the ambiguous metaphysical psycho-babble of Charlie Christ."


Full story: http://newworlddisorder.ca"

"California Reaming"

Mike Davis

Voters in California were set to go to the polls on 7 October, until the election was postponed this week. When it does take place, the two-part ballot will ask whether state governor Gray Davis should be removed. It will then ask voters to choose from among 135 candidates, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, to replace Davis. Mike Davis, whose books include City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts, writes on the issues which the media's election coverage has ignored.

EVERY CANDIDATE in California's dark recall election comedy should be obliged to answer the question, "Whither Duroville?" Duroville is the California visitors never see and that pundits ignore when they debate the future of the world's sixth largest economy.

hydrarchist writes:

"The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorization, Autonomia"

Mark Coté

What powers must we confront, and what is our capacity for resistance, today when we can no longer be content to say that the old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we not perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in the ‘production of a new subjectivity’?
— Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p. 115

I want to seek a productive space between cultural studies and political economy by remembering autonomia, a theoretical and political tendency of the Italian radical left, developed ‘from below’ in the 1960s. Autonomia emphasised the self-organizing capacity of labour and everyday practices, in decentralized, nonhierarchical structures. It also strongly rejected not only the Soviet model, and the Stalinist party with its centralized leadership, but by and large representational politics. By the 1970s, autonomia had become a heterogeneous grouping of students, labour, women, and the marginalized. In some strands of autonomia—it has always been a diffused and contested movement —there was an increasingly strong influence of French poststructuralist thought, especially by Foucaultian microphysics of power and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the inherent productivity of desire and subjectivity. These influences are manifested perhaps most clearly in the autonomist concept of the ‘social factory’ which sees power and productivity as dispersed, emanating as much in subjectivities, everyday life, and cultural practices as in traditionally-defined ‘factory labour.’
My longer-term interest is in the complex relationship between subjectivity, autonomy, and capitalist reproduction. For now, I want to take a figure well known in cultural studies—Michel Foucault—and remake him, in order to introduce what myself and others have taken to calling the ‘communication school’ of autonomist thought. To do so, I am following the Foucauldian impulse of ‘fabrication.’ That is, I want to construct all the necessary travelling documents in order to take Foucault on a spatial and temporal journey to a particular Italy—to make up the ‘Italian Foucault.’ In constructing the ‘fiction’ of the ‘Italian Foucault’ I am not willfully misconstruing an historical and theoretical narrative; rather, I am seeking lines of affinity in order to stimulate the imaginary in terms of what might be done—in terms of scholarly pursuits between cultural studies and marxist political economy; and in terms of our practices in everyday life. Thus, this paper will give Foucault the credentials of a particular kind of ‘marxist’, and take him through some foundational automonist texts before setting him down in the Bologna, first circa 1977, and then today.

"Learning To Love Leni"

Slavoj Zizek, In These Times, 9.10.03


The life and work of Leni Riefenstahl, who died on
Monday at age 101, seems to lend itself to a mapping of
a devolution, progressing toward a dark conclusion. It
began with the early "mountain films" of the 1920s that
she starred in and later began directing as well, which
celebrated heroism and bodily effort in the extreme
conditions of mountain climbing. It went on to her
notorious Nazi documentaries in the ‘30s, celebrating
bodily discipline, concentration, and strength of will
in sport as well as in politics. Then, after World War
II, in her photo albums, she rediscovered her ideal of
bodily beauty and graceful self-mastery in the Nuba
African tribe. Finally, in her last decades, she
learned the difficult art of deep sea diving and
started shooting documentaries about the strange life
in the dark depths of the sea.

"The Slaves of Money -- And Our Rebellion"

Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN, September 11, 2003


Brothers and sisters of Mexico and the world, who are
gathered in Cancun in a mobilisation against neo-
liberalism, greetings from the men, women, children and
elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. It
is an honour for us that, amid your meetings,
agreements and mobilisations, you have found time and
place to hear our words.

"Cancun Report: As Empire Builder,
the U.S. Feels the Heat"

Tom Hayden, AlterNet September 10, 2003

CANCUN, Sept. 8. "The Real Cancun" is a pretty
trashy film, with hard-partying American college kids
being awakened by mariachi musicians against the vista
of a Hilton hotel designed like the nearby Mayan ruins.
In one scene, its hero, Alan, tells his drinking
partner, "People like what they can't have. So, if you
want a girl to really like you, just blow her off."

"Free Trade Is War"

Naomi Klein, The Nation, September 12, 2003

On Monday, seven antiprivatization activists were arrested in
Soweto for blocking the installation of prepaid water meters. The
meters are a privatized answer to the fact that millions of poor
South Africans cannot pay their water bills.

"The Global Economy in Transition"

Henry C.K. Liu

An economy is not an abstraction. An economy is the material
manifestation of a political system, which in turn is the interplay of
group interests representing, among others, gender, age, religion,
property, class, sector, region or nation. Individual interests are not
issues of politics. Therefore, the politics of individualism is an
oxymoron, and by extension, the Hayekian notion of a market of
individual decisions is an ideological fantasy. Markets are phenomena
of large numbers and herd instinct where unique individualism is of
little consequence. The defining basis of politics is power, which
takes many forms: moral, intellectual, financial, electoral and
military. In an overcapacity environment, company executives lament
about the loss of pricing power. The global economy is the material
manifestation of the global geopolitical system, and global
macroeconomics is the rationalization of that geopolitical system.

BUZZFLASH: Many of our readers don't realize that you are an economics
professor at Princeton. How did you come to write a column for The New
York Times
op-ed page?


KRUGMAN: Well, they just called me out of the blue. Actually it was
Tom Friedman who acted as intermediary, because I'd met him. But it
was just out of the blue. It was 1999, and at the time, it seemed like
our problem was: "How do we deal with prosperity and all the
interesting things that were happening in the business world?" They
thought that they needed somebody to write about that, and somehow had
learned that in addition to regular professor-type stuff, I'd actually
been writing journalistic pieces for Fortune and for Slate, and they
asked me to come on. It seemed like it might be interesting and fun,
and of course we figured that the U.S. policy would be sensible and
reasonable, and I'd be writing mostly about disasters elsewhere of the
new economy. And what do you know? It turned out to be something
quite different from anything we imagined.

Pages