Radical media, politics and culture.

jim submits:

Here is the first part of an extensive interview by Greek comrades with George Caffentzis. The second installment can be found here.

TPTG's Conversation with George Caffentzis

PREFACE


George Caffentzis, an offspring of Greek immigrants from Lakonia, a place in southern Greece, is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine. But, as you will see it for yourselves, the 15th of October, 2000, was not for us "an evening with a philosopher". George is an activist to a fault. We met him for the first time in Athens on the 14th of October, 2000, but we have been in correspondence with Midnight Notes editors since 1993. By that time we had published two texts of our own on the Gulf War and the Macedonian Question and we had distributed here some important documents about the Gulf War (like Ten Days That Shook Iraq). So, we were looking for comrades abroad who had done some theoretical work on the connection between capitalism and war and who had also taken part in anti-war movements. That year we discovered the 10th issue of Midnight Notes which was devoted to the "New Enclosures". We immediately understood that we had to do with a very important work and that we had to learn more about their activities. So we came in touch with them and they sent us a few back issues and their book called Midnight Oil which had just been published by Autonomedia in New York. Without any exaggeration, only Marx's and Kropotkin's work, Debord's Society of the Spectacle, Barrot's Fascism/Antifascism and the critique of counterculture by the american Situationists had as a decisive influence on us as Midnight Oil. Some of the articles in the book lent credit to our belief that war is a means of keeping the working class under discipline. But, most important, we discovered in it one of the most original and open-minded definitions of the working class and its struggles. The study of Zerowork/Midnight Notes' work was fundamental for us. In the last 8 years we' ve tried to combine their views on unwaged work, the community/circulation of working class struggles and the crisis of social reproduction with Marx's and the Situationists' critique of alienation and ideology and we believe that this has helped a lot the development of our theoretical/practical activity. (For example, see our articles on Mexico and the struggles in education in Greece). But our disagreements with George are fundamental, too. His text, "Notes on the Antiglobalisation Movement 1985-2000", which he had given us the night before, sparked off the debate between us in the second part of the conversation. Our disagreements do not arise from different interpretations of the debt crisis (it certainly was a crisis of class relations) or of the origins of the "antiglobalization movement" (if the word "globalization" is another word for Structural Adjustment Programmes or global neoliberalism, it is certainly true that the "movement" started as a series of non-coordinated, spontaneous reactions against it)-- they arise from George's refusal to draw a distinction between social uprisings against SAPs and their political, reformist representation (a form of representation one can find both in the "first" and the "third" world). Then again, unlike George, we consider a movement to be proletarian judging not only by its social composition but also by its forms of activity and its objectives. We believe that this conversation was of benefit to both sides: we started examining "globalization" and the movements against it more carefully and George -- in a critical text he wrote about Genoa -- admitted that the "movement" is disconnected from the needs of the inhabitants of the cities in which the demonstrations take place (which is an indirect admission of the fact that there is a communication gap between the "movement" and the working-class).

"What Is Happening in the United States?"

Edward Said,
April 22, 2003

"If it was their war, it was also their government and their
politics. For the defenders of democracy to conspire with
plotters of a coup d'etat, no matter how cogent the reasons,
could not be hailed in the history books as the American
way. It was a step in the folly of self-betrayal." -- Barabara Tuchman, The March of Folly

 In a scarcely reported speech given on the Senate floor on March 19, the
day the war was launched against Iraq, Robert Byrd, Democrat of West
Virginia and the most eloquent speaker in that chamber, asked "what is
happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores
and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining
international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to
using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomacy when
the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?" No one bothered to
answer him, but as the vast American military machine now planted in
Iraq begins to stir restlessly in other directions in the name of the
American people, their love of freedom, and their deep-seated values,
these questions give urgency to the failure, if not the corruption of
democracy that we are living through.

 

"The Unthinkable Is Becoming Normal"

 John Pilger, The Independent,
UK, 03.05.2003 [13:10]

Last Sunday, seated in the audience at the Bafta television awards ceremony,
I was struck by the silence. Here were many of the most influential members
of the liberal elite, the writers, producers, dramatists, journalists and
managers of our main source of information, television; and not one broke
the silence. It was as though we were disconnected from the world outside: a
world of rampant, rapacious power and great crimes committed in our name by
our government and its foreign master.

jim submits:

"The Casting of Shadows:

10 Abstract Questions, and More Notes for Brutal Times"

Thomas Zummer

"...government is merely the shadow cast on culture by big business...."

It was in a recent conversation that the above phrase came up. It was
attributed to Harry S. Truman, and, without checking references, I am
reasonably sure that that is at least a likely attribution. Nonetheless,
I have left it in the form in which it was pronounced, at second hand, a
possible paraphrase, in order to open a series of questions. So much of
what passes for public discourse operates as a paraphrase, even if in
only the most minimal sense, as occurs in the recording and transmission
of spoken dialogue, or the presumed verisimilitude of an unintentional,
unimpeded, camera.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Essays into Digital Aesthetics

Interview with Anna Munster

by Geert Lovink



Anna Munster is one of Australia's distinguished media theorists. Besides
her critical writings she is also a digital artist. She works with digital
imaging and audio to make still, interactive and online work. Her work is
concerned with digital and baroque spaces and the placement of bodies within
these spaces. In 2000 she produced Wundernet
(http://wundernet.cofa.unsw.edu.au), a website on wonder, curiosity, the
digital and baroque, the topic of her PhD that she is currently turning into
a book provisionally titled Disturbing the Machine: Embodiment, Aesthetics
and Technology in the Time of the Digital. In 2002, while living in Sydney,
I became familiar with her probes into the terrain of digital aesthetics and
got inspired by her passion for new media arts. After studying philosophy
and digital aesthetics Anna Munster obtained a PhD in digital media theory
and production from the University of New South Wales. She has exhibited in
Australia, Japan, America and online, written for publications including
M/C, Photofile, Artlink, Australian Feminist Studies, and contributed to
various anthologies. She lectures in Digital Media Theory in the School of
Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South
Wales (Sydney). Since 2002 Anna Munster is member the Fibreculture
facilitators group, the Australian network of new media artists and
researchers (www.fibreculture.org). She is currently working on a book
together with Elspeth Probyn, editing Body-to-Body: A Corporeal Reader. In
this interview we talk about the ins and out of digital aesthetics, the
arts-meets-science rhetoric and the economic reality of the digital dream.

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Thomas Friedman's Life as a Pet Hamster"

John Chuckman

If you ever had a pet hamster when you were young, you know what I mean about hearing its regular scrambling and spinning on the exercise wheel. The squeak-squeak sound becomes an amusing background noise of everyday life.

There is a powerful analogy in the life of a pet hamster to the work of mainline American columnists, but I think there are few it better suits than Thomas Friedman, and I am not referring to his pudgy, whiskered looks.

jim submits:

"Bothersome Reality"

Thomas Zummer

. . . all bothersome reality appears as if wiped away.
-- Alfred Polgar, 1912

It is 2003.

In 1912, Alfred Polgar had been speaking of the cinema, drawing a comparison
between its economies and those of the stage, where the possibility of
puncturing the illusion of theater is always in potentia directed to a
fragile and unstable image. Perhaps we have to return, again, to such
instances to remind ourselves of the genealogical chain of virtualities by
which media stabilizes its image -- that is to say, its world -- putting the
world into a picture, as Heidegger might have said, advancing a tactical
isomorphism, as a reflection, a conduit to the realities that are taking
place. In, for example, a war.


The problem is that there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack...

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head"

James F. Moore, Berkman Center for Internet & Society

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a "second superpower" that can keep the US in check.  Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process.  Where can the world find such a second superpower?  No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations.  But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

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