Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade submits
Tandem Surfing the Third Wave: Part 3, interview with
subRosa


Ryan Griffis

This interview was conducted between subRosa and Ryan
Griffis via email correspondence during the first half
of 2003.

subRosa is an artists collective that produces
performative and new media projects that critique the
relationships between digital technologies,
biotechnologies and women's bodies/lives/work. subRosa
was initiated in the fall of 1998 as a project at the
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, from which it has evolved
into its current form, a collective of five women
dispersed throughout the US. A new book, Domain
Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices,
edited by Faith
Wilding, Michelle Wright and Maria Fernandez, was
recently released by the group and published by
Autonomedia Books. subRosa can be found on the Web at
Cyberfeminism.

1.

RG: Could you briefly discuss cyberfeminism and how it
relates to other historical versions of feminism and
critical theory?




Rob Eshelman



I didn’t sleep very well; all night I heard the sound of tanks maneuvering through the streets of Jenin. Or were they the sounds of bulldozers? Why would a bulldozer be running at three in the morning? Getting up from the flat roof of an office building where I was trying to sleep I’d look over the edge of the building.



Then came the sound of distinct gunfire. The rapid crackle of fully automatic M-16 fire, the tell tale sign of the Israeli Defense Forces. They’ve got unlimited ammunition whereas Al Aksa and other Palestinian resistance groups don’t so they opt for semi-automatic bursts or single shots. I didn’t sleep much and the next day I was to travel to Salfit.

August 19,2003


THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE


by Caoimhe Butterly in Baghdad


Anwar Adel Khardom points  to her heavily pregnant,shrapnel-sprayed stomach as she fluctuates between composure and frantic, inconsolable grief. 'What sort of life will this child be born into?' Her thirteen year old daughter Hadil, frail arms bruised and scarred with shrapnel, head bandaged with white gauze, remains wide-eyed and observant, fanning her mother with a woven fan as the heat of an oppressive, airless day reaches it's midday climax.The room is crowded with relatives and friends who drink the bitter coffee and cry and keen in memory of  Anwar's husband, Adel, her 18-year old son Haider, 17-year old daughter Ola, and 8-year old daughter Mervat-all shot dead by U.S.soldiers seven days before. 'How could they, why did they do it-they must of known we were a family-how could they kill my babies?', Anwar asks continually as she holds a picture of her beautiful, smiling children immortalised on the black banners hung on the outside walls of her family home,each of their names withshaheed (martyr) scripted next to it, proclaiming the family's tragedy to the hushed street outside.



The car that carried Anwar's family into a  line of fire that pumped more than twenty bullets through the windshield and chassis into the warm living flesh,vital organs and skulls of her husband and children remains outside.The seats and headrests were ripped apart by bullets and remain covered in faded,darkened bloodstains.Hadil's blood-stained handprints on the outside of the car are the same colour,left there as she groped her way out of the car that held dead Ola and Haider and dying Adel and Mervat, trying to follow her mother as Anwar ran towards the house they had just come from,screaming for help. No help came,at 9:30 p.m. on August 7 in Hyatt al Tunis,a residential neighborhood in Baghdad.U.S. soldiers continued to shoot so erratically at anyone attempting to help the wounded,that they proceeded to injure at least five other civilians and two of their own soldiers, as other troops stationed in a military base stationed at the end of the street joined in. Ground troops from the First Brigade,First Armoured Division proceeded to fire round after round into the darkened street ,shattering the quiet of a summer night and destroying the remnants of tolerance held by that,and many other communities,towards an occupational presence whose benign veneer grows thinner by the day. When the up to twenty minutes of constant shooting stopped,three civilians were dead and more wounded.Saef A.,a 21-year old university student, who drove in a car with two friends down the same road into the path of U.S. occupational forces(who were in the process of raiding and searching a local store,and ,having been subjected to the standard continual diet of mis-information and racism,suitably terrified enough to view all Iraqis as potential or actual enemies)was shot repeatedly and then-as his two friends,both wounded,leapt out of the car,witnesses report seeing a soldier approaching the car, point a gun with a grenade-launcher attached at the still-living Saef, and shoot, causing the car, and Saef's body to be engulfed in flames.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Bert Brecht, Minstrel of the GPU"

Ruth Fischer


Introduction By Bob Gould

The 75th anniversary of the first performance of Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera occurred recently. Over the past few years there have been several major critical biographies of Brecht, and studies of his relationship with his female artistic collaborators. There is no question that Brecht was one of the two or three most influential playwrights of the 20th century, and his artistic influence has been generally progressive. Nevertheless, his work includes a hard Stalinist aspect, which, for instance in the 1970s, made a kind of romantic Stalinism acceptable to some intellectuals and students. The play Ruth Fischer discusses below is better known in English as The Measures Taken, and is still in print in the comprehensive Methuen library of Brecht plays. Fischer's book, Stalin and German Communism, is of great historical interest, particularly to people who may have followed the discussion of the notion of Zinovievism.

"No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

Judith Butler

Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-semitic in their effect if not their intent. -- Lawrence Summers, 17 September 2002


When the president of Harvard University declared that to criticise Israel at this time and to call on universities to divest from Israel are 'actions that are anti-semitic in their effect, if not their intent', he introduced a distinction between effective and intentional anti-semitism that is controversial at best. The counter-charge has been that in making his statement, Summers has struck a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not in intent. Although he insisted that he meant nothing censorious by his remarks, and that he is in favour of Israeli policy being 'debated freely and civilly', his words have had a chilling effect on political discourse. Among those actions which he called 'effectively anti-semitic' were European boycotts of Israel, anti-globalisation rallies at which criticisms of Israel were voiced, and fund-raising efforts for organisations of 'questionable political provenance'. Of local concern to him, however, was a divestment petition drafted by MIT and Harvard faculty members who oppose Israel's current occupation and its treatment of Palestinians. Summers asked why Israel was being 'singled out . . . among all nations' for a divestment campaign, suggesting that the singling out was evidence of anti-semitic intentions. And though he claimed that aspects of Israel's 'foreign and defence' policy 'can be and should be vigorously challenged', it was unclear how such challenges could or would take place without being construed as anti-Israel, and why these policy issues, which include occupation, ought not to be vigorously challenged through a divestment campaign. It would seem that calling for divestment is something other than a legitimately 'vigorous challenge', but we are not given any criteria by which to adjudicate between vigorous challenges that should be articulated, and those which carry the 'effective' force of anti-semitism.

jim submits ""Ravachol"

Octave Mirbeau

Translated and introduced by Robert Helms


Francois-Claudius Koeningstein (Oct. 14, 1859 -- July 11, 1892), known to posterity as Ravachol, was born to Dutch and French parents at Saint-Chamond, near St. Etienne in Eastern France. He was angered by two actions taken by the French government on May 1, 1891. One was at Fourmies, where the newly designed Lebels machine gun was used against a peaceful May Day rally at which women and children were carrying flowers and palms. Casualties there numbered 14 dead and 40 wounded. The other incident was at Clichy, where police attacked a six-man anarchist labor rally. The workers defended themselves with pistol-shots and were subsequently given long terms at hard labor.

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"The Discourse of History"

Roland Barthes


Translated by Stephen Bann. Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981): 7-20. Pagination, superscripts, and accents are not preserved. Please see source for the final three notes.


The formal description of sets of words beyond the level of the sentence (what we call for convenience discourse) is not a modern development: from Gorgias to the nineteenth century, it was the special concern of traditional rhetoric. Recent developments in the science of language have nonetheless endowed it with a new timeliness and new methods of analysis: a linguistic description of discourse can perhaps already be envisaged at this stage; because of its bearings on literary analysis (whose importance in education is well known) it is one of the first assignments for semiology to undertake.

Anonymous Kumquat submits:


An Interview with Sadie Plant

Brett Stalbaum and Geri Wittig

(Sadie Plant is Research Fellow and Director of the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture and The Most Radical Gesture :
The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age.
)

Brett Stalbaum/Geri Wittig: Your work tends to
challenge hierarchical orthodoxies in their varied
cultural manifestations, but your approach doesn't
challenge them with replacement hierarchies, but
rather with distributed models. How does this strategy
relate to emerging electronic activism?

Anonymous Comrade submits:


"Busting up Biotech:

Mass Resistance in Sacramento to the Corporate Take-Over of Food"

Patrick Reinsborough, smartMeme project


From June 20-25, 2003 Sacramento became an unlikely frontline in the
ongoing clash
between the Bush administration's imperial agenda and the
diverse movements
demanding democracy, justice and ecological sanity. The
occasion was the
U.S. government sponsored Ministerial Conference and Expo on
Agricultural
Science and Technology, which was supposed to be another
opportunity for the
Bush administration to quietly push its corporate agenda in the
lead up to
the September World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun.

Take Back the Black and Green!

Ecological Anarchy at the Brink of the Future



For far too long the anti-authoritarian ecology movement has been limited

to two snobbishly opposed groups: so called Green Anarchy, influenced by

Deep Ecology and Zerzan primitivism, and Social Ecology, influenced by

biological science and classical radical left thought. These camps have

battled back and forth in public and publication for so long one can't

help but feel that the argument has become more one of childish pride than

intellectual curiosity or political action. Both groups seem now hackneyed

and are met, more often than not, with little but yawns and eye rolling.

The irrationality and churlishness of one bounces off of the dogmatism and

polemic of the other, catching in the middle those of us for whom the

matter is not so black and white (or green...). For those of us who see

advantages in both systems, who also see problems in both, there seems

little room for middle ground, and scorn on either side. For those of us

who wish to act, and who wish to move on, it is clear that this stubborn

bickering has gone on far too long. It is clear that we must synthesize

and erase, pick and choose, and advance our critique of this civilization

which stands so at odds with health, freedom, ecology and life in general.

With every condo built, every stomach left unfed, and every dollar spent,

the need for a cogent and rational ecological anarchy becomes more

immediate.



For more information write the 400th Generation Collective:

twelvethousandyears@riseup.net

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