Radical media, politics and culture.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Notes on Bourdieu

Gene Ray

It’s been five years since the French sociologist and activist Pierre Bourdieu died. In Berlin, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, the educational arm of the Leftist Party, marked his “death day” by putting on a two-day conference called “A Wide Field: The Left and Bourdieu.” (Does the day of his death mean something different than his birthday, as the occasion for an academic conference? And if so, what?)

In his last decade, Bourdieu became an energetic opponent of neoliberal economic policies. His textual salvos, practical interventions, and effective organizing are impressive and inspiring. Along with Noam Chomsky and a few others, he may be a last instance of that principled “public intellectual” targeted for extinction by market-driven structural adjustments in the universities. Still, the affinities are obvious between Bourdieu and the Leftist Party, which more than others in the German parliamentary system has voiced a coherent opposition to the neoliberalist onslaught.

Presumably the aim of this conference was to explore how far these affinities extend to the large body of Bourdieu’s theoretical work and sociological research. This is not a report on the conference, which I didn’t attend. I’m told it was great; why shouldn’t it have been? What follows is more like a supplemental contribution from the outside.

If Bourdieu’s death day is a valid occasion for commissioned reflections from academics[1], then who will complain if we unsalaried DIYers think it should be good enough for us, as well?

Notes on Paolo Virno in Buenos Aires

Maribel Casas-Cortés + Sebastián Cobarrubias (part of the Notas Rojas Translation Network), Federico Geller

Virno’s visit to Buenos Aires in September 2006, invited by Colectivo Situaciones and Tinta Limon press, brought new perspectives into a public space characterized by the lack of a radical critique to the state. This absence is due in part to the notable recovery, although incomplete, of the institutional legitimacy of the state in Argentina and neighboring countries.


His porteño* [* Translators’ note: porteño = from Buenos Aires] debut was at the School of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Buenos Aires focusing on the general intellect and its political potential as the main topic. Later, he presented his most recent book, Ambivalencia de la multitud (The Ambivalence of the Multitude), at the National Library where Virno followed his own argument elaborated in the chapter of that book: "El llamado 'mal' y la crítica del estado" ("So-called 'Evil' and the Critique of the State"). At the Latin American School of Social Sciences he dissected the encounter between Foucault and Chomsky focusing on the issue of human nature. All three events were well attended.


Three questions from the audience, made at different moments during his presentations, give a rough idea of the context of these events:

1) In light of the fact that nothing remains from the processes that emerged in 2001 in Argentina, the fall of the EZLN and the strengthening of Lopez Obrador in Mexico, what do you think about the critique that Rosa Luxembourg made of Lenin and the Bolsheviks when they abolished the constituent in favor of the soviets? It is clear that a problem of discontinuity and repetition exists in movements: there is no antidote to this fragileness yet. Virno expressed his agreement with Rosa Luxembourg: both constituents and committees are required: “Movements must learn to create norms and to get out of the rhetoric of impotence!”


2) How can we think of the Multitude’s enemy?
The enemy is the Pharaoh: those who recreate the form of the statist “One”. The whisperings of the many in the Exodus. The Superdome in New Orleans. The strength of the many: the intent to recreate the “people” as a technical category opposed to the Multitude.


3) Do you believe in the possibility for alliances between the State and social movements in South America?
Virno answered that he has heard many positive things as well as many negative things about the progressive governments of South America. He wants to know more, but believes that: (i) they definitely represent a global contradiction that is important to take into account and (ii) governments producing liberation is not to be believed, but it is worth asking whether governments can open spaces so that movements can produce liberation, in their spaces of everyday life and in the world of work.


According to Virno, an entirely post-fordist world would be unworkable, but the intellectual faculties of the human animal become the fundamental resource for processes of production, which in and of itself exceeds the time and space of a workshop or factory, in the same way that the general intellect exceed the machine and technological tools, constituting ‘live work’.


The question is: “how this grouping of natural abilities, today presented to us as productive capacities, can turn into institutional forms contrary to the State?”


To respond to this it is necessary to abandon the juvenile contempt for the word “institution”: an activist collective that invents its own norms and is guided by them is also an institution. It’s an issue of animals protecting themselves from danger.


There is an enormous gap between the productive system and the intent to create a political order at the level of that productive process. Our challenge is to translate the diverse forms of the general intellect into spatiality. Without space there is not politics.


In 1932, Carl Schmitt, a Nazi philosopher, presented a challenge about the relations between theories of State and their anthropological base. For Schmitt, the hostility that anarchists have towards the State presupposed the innate goodness of human beings, however the majority of what was understood as political theory supposed that human beings were “bad” and problematic. This then justified the necessity of a “monopoly of political decision-making”.


In the words of Hobbes, the problem is posed as an opposition between the “civil state” and the “state of nature”: the monopoly over political decision-making would constitute the pseudo-environment able to contain the multitude, disregarded by Hobbes as a reccurrence of the state of nature within the civil state.


In the famous disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault in 1971, Chomsky followed the argument of the anarchists, justifying the need to struggle against state hierarchies and capitalism due to their oppression of the collective creativity of our species, this capacity being the result of a supposedly universal grammatical structure that is written into our DNA. Foucault denied discussing the existence of a human nature, considering the concept as a mere epistemological indicator of the changing relations between disciplines at distinct moments of history. According to Virno, “that night, the two teachers showed the worst of themselves”.


Virno doesn’t want to escape from an investigation into human nature. But his vision of the bio-anthropological redundancies does not establish an inclination of our species towards “good” or “bad”, rather it posits our ambivalence: it is the image of a “neoténico” animal confronted with the absence of a defined environment, which would imply a constant “openness towards the world”, a source of potential and dangerous instability. Virno suggest that this instability – denominated “bad/evil”— could be the pedestal for a “radical hostility toward the State”.


Differing from Chomsky, Virno considers the role of language to be that of opening possibilities for ambivalence. He takes the work of the Italian neurobiologist Gallese on mirror neurons into consideration. These neurons, hypothetically, constitute the physiological base of recognition between like beings. Virno suggests that the capacity for negation allows one to hide the natural recognition amongst similar being as well as recover it. In this schema, our unchanging aspects are transformed from top to bottom by our verbal capacity.


His proposal – recognizing the escape from a state of nature as impossible— is to take up the concept of the Katechon, which appears in St. Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians: the force that can contain “evil”, confronting but not eliminating it.


His question: what non-state and anti-monopolist institutions, what normative systems, can confront, without proposing annulment, the return to infinitude, compulsory repetition, the state of nature which has become a civil state through the process of a globalizing world? He suggests retaking Wittgenstein’s carta magna: “A proposition could be treated, one time, as a proposition to revise, and another time as a rule for revisions.” Our contempt should be directed towards the pre-ordained obedience to norms, not towards the existence of norms that may be considered, in a dynamic way, as de jure and de facto questions.


Virno, concludes that it is of vital political importance to construct a cautious bridge over the chasm that separates the sciences of matter from the sciences of spirit. This is an invitation to build our own natural history, in a way that can take into account both the evolutionary narratives that explain the invariable aspects of the human species, as well as the historical narrative of the contingencies in which those invariable aspects express themselves.

All Gods, All Masters: Immanence and Anarchy/Ontology

Will Weikart

From Fifth Estate


Almost all contemporary radical thought is marked by dialectics. Classical anarchism, Marxism (in all its variants), and the Situationists owe a huge debt to the thought of German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, and hence to dialectics. For example, the political thought of anarchist and anti-authoritarian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin, Guy Debord, Murray Bookchin and Fredy Perlman all rely on dialectical thinking. Poststructuralist social theorist Michel Foucault even characterized Hegel's theories as the ghost that prowls through the 20th century. In fact, dialectics are so hegemonic in radical circles that a common objection to a perspective is that it is 'insufficiently dialectical'.

But contemporary radicalism is not 'insufficiently dialectical'; rather, it is too dialectical. Dialectics are virtually everywhere (and not just on the Left), tacitly informing much of what we do and how we think, often unconsciously, and even (or perhaps particularly) for those who have never read Hegel or Marx. Contrary to its claims, it is dialectics that is insufficient to account for the utter multiplicity of movement and change. This daunting complexity of the world is not a cause for despair and inaction, however. Rather, it is the opposite: instead of being reduced down, our complex world should be valorized and exalted. We should critically re-examine our intellectual baggage in order to question some of the underlying assumptions of how we think and act politically.

Anonymous Comrade writes

Eyal Weizman


The Art of War
Frieze, Issue 99


The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools.


The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1 During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Eric Peterson

The Zapatistas - A Movement Becomes A Teenager

The Mexican – Indigenous movement ”Ejército Zapatista por la Liberación Nacional” – EZLN – has since its “birth” January 1. 1994 been able to attract world wide attention with its spectacular actions. Outsiders may have difficulties to get an idea of what the movement is really about, but the Zapatistas once described their political philosophy like this:

“Zapatismo is not an ideology
It is not a bought and paid for doctrine.
It is …an intuition.
Something so open and flexible that
it really occurs in all places.
Zapatismo poses the question:
“What is it that has excluded me?”
“What is it that has isolated me?”
…In each place the response is different.
Zapatismo simply states the question
and stipulates that the response is plural,
that the response is inclusive……”

Lately, international attention may have dropped off somewhat, but the EZLN still posses the capacity to bring themselves into focus. At the end of the 2006 the movement celebrated its 13 years anniversary at a meeting in the small mountainous village Oventik in Chiapas, in the south of Mexico. The birthday was celebrated in the presence of more than 4000 guests, of whom some 1100 were internationals coming from more than 40 different countries. The 4-day long party contained a series of speeches by the zapatistas on alternative culture, commerce, women’s role and media, where the guests were presented with the EZLN’s point of view, and then had the opportunity to ask questions and finally could present their own vision.

Juan Santos writes:

"Mel Gibson's 'Apocalypto':

The Cinematic Logic of Genocide"

Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s "Apocalypto" is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike "Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ", "Apocalypto" is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality "Apocalypto" isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of "Apocalypse Now!", there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.

"Apocalypse II in Samarra:

US Kills 6 at National Dialogue Front Office"

Juan Cole

CBS/AP report that an angry crowd of Sunni Arab demonstrators in the
northern city of Samarra, protesting Saddam's execution, broke "broke
the locks off the badly damaged Shiite Golden Dome mosque and marched
through carrying a mock coffin and photo of the executed former leader."


Folks, this is very bad news. The Askariyah Shrine (it isn't just a
mosque) is associated with the Hidden Twelfth Imam, who is expected
by Shiites to appear at the end of time to restore the world to
justice. (For them, the Imam Mahdi is sort of like the second coming
of Christ for Christians). The Muqtada al-Sadr movement is
millenarian and believes he will reveal himself at any moment.


The centrality of the cult of the Twelfth Imam, a direct descendant
of the Prophet Muhammad who is said to have vanished in 873 AD, helps
explain why the bombing of the Golden Dome on February 21 of 2006 set
off a frenzy of Shiite, Sadrist attacks on Sunni Arabs. Last
February, stuck in a Phoenix hotel because of a missed flight and
without an internet connection for my laptop, I blogged from my Treo
that it was an apocalyptic day. Sadly, it was, kicking off a frenzy
of sectarian violence that has grown each subsequent month.

A Dictator Created Then Destroyed by America

Robert Fisk, Independent

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving
of that last walk to the scaffold — that crack of the neck at the end of a rope
— than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered
untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons
over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great
day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his
death sentence was signed — by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the
Americans — on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the
moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.


But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many
millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that
will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative
laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers — what about the other
guilty men?


No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not
Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead — and thousands of Western troops are
dead — because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the
Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a
potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great
brutality.

"These Sinister Christmas Holidays"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Granma

Nobody remembers God at Christmas. There is such a roar of horns and
fireworks, so many garlands of colorful lights; so many innocent,
slaughtered turkeys; and so much stress from spending beyond our
means in order to look good that one wonders if anyone has any time
to ponder that such madness is to celebrate the birthday of a boy
born 2,000 years ago in a destitute horse stable, a short distance
from where a few thousand years before King David was born.


Nine hundred and fifty-four million Christians believe that this boy
was God reincarnated, but many celebrate his birth as if they don't
really believe it. In addition, there are several millions who have
never believed it but like to party and many others who would be
willing to turn the world upside down so that nobody would believe
it. It would be interesting to find out how many of them also
wholeheartedly believe that the Christmas of today is a revolting
holiday but don't dare say it for a prejudice that is no longer
religious, but social.

Kuwasi at 60

Kazembe Balagun


On December 16, 2006 over 75 people gathered at LAVA in West Philadelphia. The crowd was a mix of Black liberation movement veterans (young and old), anarchist punks and white queer activists from ACT UP. They came together to pay homage to the late Kuwasi Balagoon, who would have turned 60 years old this year. Balagoon is not an immediately recognizable name in the pantheon of revolutionaries, yet he has developed into an underground hero 20 years after his death. This is due in large part to the maze of contradictions that constructed Balagoon’s life.

As a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, he was the quintessential outlaw, escaping prison twice and leading units in the expropriation of banks, including the infamous Nyack armored car heist in 1983 (an incident that served as a basis for the film Dead Presidents). Balagoon was also a humanist, who enjoyed painting, writing poetry and baking for his fellow inmates. However, it was Kuwasi’s identification as a queer anarchist that has sparked renewed interest in his life. “He was an anarchist in a black nationalist movement, he was queer in a straight dominated movement, he was a guerrilla fighter after it was “chic,” and he never backed down from his ideals, his beliefs, the struggle or him self. And he demanded to be seen not as a revolutionary icon, but as a person, beautiful and flawed,” said Walidah Imarisha, poet and one of the presenters at the Balagoon memorial.

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