Radical media, politics and culture.
June 13, 2003 - 11:04am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Man Who Wasn't There"

John Chuckman, June 11, 2003

I read something recently about America's Middle East initiative, the "road map," offering Bush the chance for greatness. Verbal excess like that demands a realistic discussion of the prospects.

June 13, 2003 - 10:41am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Sex, Race and Class"

Selma James

There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.

June 11, 2003 - 11:43am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Historicizing the Spontaneous Revolution:

Anarchism
and the Spatial Politics of Postmodernism"

Nicholas Spencer, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Wendell V. Harris, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Colin Falck,
Camille Paglia, Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Donald Morton --
these are just some of the many writers who have
pronounced the demise of postmodern and/or
poststructuralist thought. It seems that the regime of
the sign and discourse analysis has given way to
materialist critique and cultural studies, and while
some people may not perceive any essential antinomy
between discourse and materialism, many others welcome
these developments as finally exposing the faddish and
pretentious nature of postmodernism. As the heady
self-referentialism of postmodern culture continues, a
cooling of academic interest may enable scholars to
examine the traditions and influences relevant to
postmodernism's career more clearly.

June 5, 2003 - 10:32am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Geneva03 submits:
The following is an agreed statement of the Geneva03 Autonomous Media Collective who assembled and produced the live stream in recent days.



Geneva03: the Bubble Bursts


Locked away in their lakeside resort, the G8 must reckon once again with their own abject failure. Met by demonstrations and the diffuse violence produced by systemic crisis, they have no answers except escalations of that violence. That is the same as no answer at all. Their opponents, meanwhile, have no programme but to celebrate the G8's eclipse.

June 5, 2003 - 10:25am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"The Eros Effect"

An Interview with George Katsiaficas

George Katsaficas is a professor of Humanities and Social Studies at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. In 2001 he spent time reasearching the Kwangju uprising in South Korea. He is the editor of New Political Science and the author of several books including The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life and Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. He has also edited several books, most recently The Battle for Seattle. A close friend of Herbert Marcuse, Katsiaficas runs the website ErosEffect.com.

RAAN came into contact with Katsiaficas mostly because of his book The Subversion of Politics, which dealt in part with the German Autonomen and Italian Autonomia. After a few exchanges of dialogue, RAAN was able to conduct this interview, in which they have tried to hit on some practical solutions to common problems within the anti-authoritarian movement. This interview originally appeared in the first issue of Praxis, journal of the Red & Anarchist Action Network (Summer, 2003).

June 4, 2003 - 12:46pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
News

Anonymous Comrade submits:


"Banality, Bombast, and Blood"

John Chuckman

The saga of America's Private Lynch, no matter what the details of her movie-set escape prove to be, adds only banality to needless bloodshed in Iraq.




Another young American woman, Marla Ruzicka, went largely ignored. Ms. Ruzicka runs a non-profit organization that works to make accurate counts of a war's civilian dead. It is small wonder Ms. Ruzicka is not given the same coverage as Private Lynch, since, based upon detailed field work in Iraq, she says that between five and ten thousand civilians were killed.

May 29, 2003 - 7:00am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

Bill Not Bored writes:

A Monumental Bad Joke

or, Lou Reed laughs all the way to the bank

What does it take to make famously stone-faced rocker Lou Reed crack a smile? Playing the blues for the first time, says Wim Wenders, director of "The Soul of a Man," the first installment in Martin Scorsese's seven-film series on the blues which premiered Friday at the Cannes Film Festival. Reed joined Beck, Bonnie Raitt and Nick Cave in interpreting the songs of Mississippi blues legend Skip James. "For Lou, it was so much fun, I am proud to announce he actually laughed," Wenders quipped. "And we have it on tape -- no photographer has ever captured him smiling on film." -- New York Daily News, 25 May 2003.

In other words, Lou Reed is a completely depraved pervert and pathetic death dwarf and everything else you want to think he is. On top of that he's a liar, a wasted talent, an artist continually in flux, and a huckster selling pounds of his own flesh. A panderer . . . . Lou Reed is the guy that gave dignity and poetry and rock 'n' roll to smack, speed, homosexuality, sadomasochism, murder, misogyny, stumblebum passivity, and suicide, and then proceeded to belie all his achievements and return to the mire by turning the whole thing into a monumental bad joke with himself as the woozily insistent Henny Youngman in the center ring, mumbling punch lines that kept losing their punch. -- Lester Bangs, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves, or How I Slugged it out with Lou Reed and Stayed Awake," 1975.

May 28, 2003 - 4:41pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Anonymous Comrade submits:

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

An Interpretation of Bush's Character

John Chuckman

While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush's upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush's character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographer's interpretation of Hitler. Ian Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler puts great emphasis on his being a driving high-stakes gambler - with innate, animal-cunning about human psychology, few gifts of statesmanship or strategy, and little systematic learning - attributing most of his success and all of his failure to his compulsive quality.

May 25, 2003 - 11:59am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

anonymous kumquat submits:

Some of the Necon media are getting mighty nervous about the recent outing of their main man...

"What Hath Strauss Wrought?"

Peter Berkowitz, Weekly Standard

The New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, among others, have sounded the alarm: The Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy team, is in the grip of a coterie of neoconservative intellectuals who are themselves in the grip of the antidemocratic and illiberal teachings of Leo Strauss, a political philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago in the '50s and '60s and who died in 1973.


On its face, this scenario is wildly implausible. It supposes that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and National Security Adviser Rice, non-Straussians by all accounts, are stooges and dupes. It insinuates that neoconservative intellectuals--Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is at the top of everybody's list--have craftily ascended to positions of power in the federal government from which they aim to implement Strauss's teachings. And it invests Strauss, a student of political philosophy whose life's work consisted in writing learnedly about thinkers from Plato to Heidegger, and sharing his discoveries with students, with almost superhuman powers: Through the force of his ideas, we are told, this scholar and teacher is able, a generation and a half after his death, to command the respect and loyalty--and indeed, to compel the actions--of highly successful and well-placed individuals not only in politics but in the media and the academy.

(Link above will get you full story, if you've got the stomach for it.)

May 25, 2003 - 11:10am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Gender

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Queer Theory in a Nutshell"

Jackie Susann

Queer theory is the academic discourse that has largely
replaced what used to be called gay and lesbian studies. The
term was coined by Teresa de Lauretis for "a working
conference on theorisising gay and lesbian sexualities that was
held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in February 1990".
The word queer has since come to be pretty much synonymous
with gay and lesbian (or maybe just gay male) but at the time
one of its main advantages was seen as its inclusiveness:
queer covered gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, trans people,
sadomasochists and a potentially endless list of others
somehow marginalised by their sexuality.

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