Radical media, politics and culture.

by Franck Düvell writes:

"The Globalisation of Migration Control"

Franck Düvell,[1] 19.May.03

The IOM recommended the Turkish government "to prevent irregular migration and to fight trafficking".[2] Later a daily paper reported, "in Turkey, nine people are shot and five other injured at an attempt to illegally cross the border. 139 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh had tried to cross the Iranian-Turkish border".[3]

"Business As Usual"

Tariq Ali, The Guardian, Saturday May 24, 2003

Unsurprisingly, the UN security council has capitulated completely,
recognised the occupation of Iraq and approved its re-colonisation by the US
and its bloodshot British adjutant. The timing of the mea culpa by the
"international community" was perfect. Yesterday, senior executives from
more than 1,000 companies gathered in London to bask in the sunshine of the
re-established consensus under the giant umbrella of Bechtel, the American
empire's most favoured construction company. A tiny proportion of the loot
will be shared.

"The Violence of the Global" [1]

Jean Baudrillard (Translated by Francois Debrix)

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of
anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary
partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is
necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly
of its relationship to the singular and the universal.


Full essay is at ctheory

"The Google AdWords Happening"

Christophe Bruno, April 2002


How to lose money with your art ?

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem : how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords . I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

I began with the keyword "symptom".

"Empire and the Capitalists"

Immanuel Wallerstein, May 15, 2003

No doubt, George W. Bush thinks he is in the forefront of those sustaining the world capitalist system. No doubt, a large part of the world left thinks that too. But do the great capitalists think so? That is far less clear. A major warning signal has been launched by Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading financial investor firms, in their Global Economic Forum. Stephen Roach writes there that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States. He specifically takes on Robert Kagan, a leading neo-con intellectual, who has been arguing that American hegemony can only increase, particularly vis-a-vis Europe. Roach could not agree less. He sees the present world situation as one of "profound asymmetries" in the world-system, one that cannot last.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Of Blair, Hussein and Genocide"

John Chuckman, May 19, 2003

Britain's Prime Minister Blair has now claimed that the war in Iraq was justified by the discovery of mass graves. The ugly truth is that mass graves have become pretty common things since the beginning of the twentieth century, although many of the world's most savage and horrific acts left no such evidence, as in the case of America's napalming, carpet-bombing and throat-cutting millions in Vietnam.

pirate greg writes:

"Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere: MAVN Conference, and the Battles Lost"

Gregory G. Sholette

"The emphasis on the passive element in experience certainly does not claim to be a theory of knowledge? But it is certainly the preliminary condition of any theory of knowledge which is not content with verbalistic and illusory solutions."

Sebastiano Timpanaro(1)



"There is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to astrophysics and cosmology than that of "dark matter". The Center for Particle Astrophysics.(2)


What does one make of a conference entitled Marxism and Visual Arts Now in which examples of contemporary, visual art were all but absent and the few speakers who did address recent artistic practices hardly strayed from citing works and practices not already ensconced within the institutional art world?(3)

"Dossier: Scattered Speculations on Value"

Toni Negri

Introduction by Ronald Judy

In the spring of 1996, Marcia Landy and I organized a boundary 2 panel for the annual Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in December of that year. We thought that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's speculation on the relationship between value and affect ("Scattered Speculations") afforded an opportunity for rigorous engagement with these concepts, their historical significance, and their viability for understanding the emerging social formations attending the global economy. We envisioned a format of collective discussion carried out through individual papers and followed by an open discussion with Professor Spivak. Among those who agreed to join in this Sprechstimme were Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Reda Bensmaia, and Etienne Balibar. Unforeseen circumstances prevented Professors Spivak and Bensmaia from taking part. Through the graciousness of Hardt and Balibar, however, the panel went ahead. We never planned for Negri to come, given his well-known political predicament -- although at the time he was free in Paris, he could not enter the United States. Still, he prepared and sent a paper that Hardt translated from the Italian and I read aloud, to which Balibar gave an informed and engaging response. Negri's paper and Hardt's talk follow in these pages. (They expand on these notions in their forthcoming book, Empire.) Despite the absence of two colleagues, the event was well received. We owe sincere thanks to those who attended the session. We want to thank Stephen Cullenberg for giving us the opportunity to present our conversation in the venue of the Rethinking Marxism conference. We are most grateful to Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Our debt to Hardt and Negri is compounded by their agreeing to allow us to publish their papers in this issue of boundary 2.

jim submits:

"Bremer of Iraq"

Bill Berkowitz, (WorkingForChange, 05.09.03)


When L. Paul Bremer III sets down in Iraq as the U.S.'s new overseer of
reconstruction, he'll be bringing a lot of baggage along with him. Chosen by
President Bush for his expertise in counter-terrorism, crisis management and
diplomacy, Bremer has a resume that includes extended service in the Reagan
Administration, an eleven-year stint at Kissinger & Associates, and the
co-chairmanship of the Heritage Foundation's Homeland Security Task Force.
That President Bush has turned to a civilian and a skilled negotiator -- the
president called Bremer a "can-do-type person'' -- is indicative of the
administration's fear that events in post-war Iraq are in danger of spinning
out of control. Bremer, the current Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of
Marsh Crisis Consulting, a subsidiary of the Marsh & McLennan Companies
(MMC), will take the reins of the multi-billion dollar reconstruction
project from retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the administration's first civil
administrator, and assume command over the Office of Reconstruction and
Humanitarian Affairs.


Full story continues at:

Bremer of Iraq"

Jason Adams writes:

"Proletariat or Multitude? A Postanarchist Critique of Empire"

Jason Adams


Introduction: A Proletarian Ideology of Progress and Productivity?

Though it is not clearly articulated as such, underlying the argument of Hardt and Negri's much-acclaimed book, Empire there is a fundamental singularity/universality nexus that is typically deployed as the basis for the emerging counter-Empire of the multitude as well as for the postmodern sovereignty of world order and the informatized production of postmodern capitalism; this is then juxtaposed to the particularity/universality nexus that had been deployed by the new social movements and left-wing nationalisms of the late twentieth century as well as the modern sovereignty and industrial production systems which they are depicted as having been actively refusing.

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