Radical media, politics and culture.

"US War With Iran Has Already Begun"

Scott Ritter, Al Jazeera

Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.


On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary."


We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the 'execute' orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.


These operations were designed to degrade Iraqi air defence and command and control capabilities. They also paved the way for the insertion of US Special Operations units, who were conducting strategic reconnaissance, and later direct action, operations against specific targets inside Iraq, prior to the 19 March 2003 commencement of hostilities.


President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.


The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.


The violation of a sovereign nation's airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence gathering phase.

joseph lee taylor writes: "Here is an article I wrote for a tour me and some mates did last summer on poststructuralism and anarchism in Eastern Europe and Turkey. It was also presented in Northern Ireland and Belgrade at the PGA."

"To Build One's House Upon the Sea"

Joe Taylor


Man created both "point" and "line" concepts. But once he understood these concepts' undeniable meanings, the rest of geometry consisted in exploring the logical implications that arose from this. This creates truth and discourse. And the "truth" was already there waiting to be "discovered" right, but this is one measure of the world, one truth that dominates, it excludes and displaces, marginalizes as we learn from Husserl in his work on geometry.


To build your house upon the sea is to build your "self", your foundation, your base, and thus your approach to the world, from a constant undulation, a moving unknown sea; Narcissus leans over to the pool and looks in, a marine lover maybe.

stevphen writes:

"Transparency To Exodus"
Brian Holmes

On Political Process in the Mediated Democracies

"What is it that separates the left from the right?... Fundamentally, it is nothing but a processual calling, a processual passion." — Felix Guattari [1]

In October of 1968, in Rosario, Argentina, the artist Graciela Carnevale invited visitors to what would be the final opening of a "Cycle of Experimental Art" held in a storefront space in the city. Her contribution to the series consisted in luring the public inside, then slipping out to lock the door and enclose the crowd within the gallery. The visitors became the material of a social artwork. The question was: How would they react to this imprisonment? Who would finally shatter the glass to release the captives from the trap? "Through an act of aggression, the work tends to provoke the spectator to a heightened consciousness of the power whereby violence is exerted in the everyday world," wrote the artist. "On a daily basis we passively submit, through fear, connivance and complicity, to all the degrees of violence, from the most subtle and degrading violence that coerces our thinking via communications media broadcasting false contents provided by their owners, to the most provocative and scandalous violence exerted on a student's life." [2] In the event, the public submitted. After an hour, the blow that finally shattered the glass came from outside. A photograph shows a woman crouching down to exit through a jagged hole in the window.

Surveillance Camera Players writes

"Surveillance Cameras in Harlem"

Not Bored

"[In the 1930s and '40s] after-hours clubs thrived on white celebrities and society folks and those slummers weren't mistreated — the ex-slaves stood off to the side in awe, watching the wealthy visitors like they was gods arriving for inspection. Crimes were ten to one in Brooklyn and the Bronx compared to Harlem — man, we policed the district ourself for muggers 'cause we knew it would kill business. But the white press ran night-life business out of Harlem with propaganda that still lasts today — that in every shadow there's a big black nigger with a knife or gun ready to rape or stick up white folks." — Charles Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, 1971.

In June 2001, members of the New York Surveillance Camera Players (SCP–New York) scouted and mapped out the locations of public surveillance cameras in a portion of Harlem, a large and very famous neighborhood in Manhattan. Once called Spanish Harlem, this Upper East Side neighborhood in New York City is defined to the south and north by 125th and 135th Streets, and to the east and west by Lexington Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. The SCP–New York chose this area for mapping because, as recently as 1998, it was still pocked by large numbers of abandoned buildings and empty lots where burnt-out buildings used to stand, and so could be used as a starting point for documenting the connections between public surveillance and capitalist reclamation ("gentrification").

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"All Bush, All the Time, for the Rest of Your Life"

John Chuckman

A group of Republican legislators proposes to rescind the 22ndAmendment to the American Constitution. This is the Amendment, passed after four terms of Franklin Roosevelt scared the bejesus out of Republicans, limiting a President to two terms in office. The legislators apparently believe that with continued Republican gains in Congress, they may be in a position to change the Constitution by 2006, in time to extend Bush's benevolent work.

"When Taste Politics Meet Terror:

The Critical Art Ensemble on Trial"

Joan Hawkins, C Theory

"And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has
been created to teach us that first of all." — Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces," 1938. [1]

Setting the Stage

In late September 2001, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus
Ohio, announced that the performances of ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
scheduled for September 26-30 had been cancelled. "We hope you'll
understand that this is not an appropriate time to present this
award-winning Off-Broadway show," the letter accompanying my refund
said. "We will continue to stay in contact with the Collective
Unconscious company who created and perform ~Charlie Victor Romeo~
regarding the potential for rescheduling CVR at the Wexner Center at
an appropriate time in the future."


~Charlie Victor Romeo~ is a documentary play, based on transcripts
taken from the black boxes of downed airplanes, the final
communication between air personnel and the tower. A serious and
sober look at the way people actually behave during a crisis, it won
the 2000 Drama Desk Awards for Best Unique Theatrical Experience and
Outstanding Sound Design, the 2000 New York Fringe Festival awards
for Excellence in Drama and Outstanding Sound Design, and the
Backstage West Garland Award for Best Sound Design. It was filmed by
the U.S. Air Force to be used as a training video for pilots and "has
been invited to be performed for groups of physicians and healthcare
administrators studying the effects of human error and emergencies in
a medical context" (www.charlievictorromeo.com). It also belongs to a
group of experimental dramas — the plays of Anna Devere Smith, ~The
Laramie Project~, etc — which have been mixing ethnography,
documentary (with the emphasis here on documents) and theater in
provocative and compelling ways. Theater which has learned and
borrowed from performance art, one could say.


In late September 2001, I was still badly shaken by the events of
9/11. I had cancelled my planned sabbatical trip to New York when the
apartment I had sublet was needed to house a writer-friend who'd been
evacuated from her flat, and nothing I heard from her about life in
the City in the immediate aftermath of tragedy bore any resemblance
to anything I was hearing on the mainstream news (with the exception
of "Democracy Now", U.S. news broadcasts were all about spin). Weary
of platitudes and patriotic cant, I was looking forward to seeing the
play, to hearing something real (in the street sense of that term)
and to feeling some connection with the New York art scene that had
been. I wanted to be challenged and I wanted to think, to be
addressed as an adult rather than as a slightly addled child. I was
disappointed when the play was cancelled. The box office staff member
who took my call was surprised at my reaction. "Most people have been
telling us they're happy we're rescheduling the show," she told me.
"When has it been rescheduled for?" I asked. "We don't know yet," she
said.


I've chosen to open this essay on the recent harassment of the
Critical Art Ensemble with this older story because it seems to me to
highlight some of the problems confronting the art world in this post
9/11, Patriot Act-hysterical, time. I understand some of the reasons
the Wexner felt it had to postpone the performance. The Wexner Center
for the Arts is small, and totally dependent on public funding and
the support of its patrons and members for survival. It certainly
cannot afford to bring a New York show to Columbus and play to a
near-empty house. And it probably can't really afford the loss of
community good will which such a move might entail.


But the cancellation also served to unmask the ambivalence with which
we (even those of us in the art world) regard truly provocative,
risk-taking art. ~Charlie Victor Romeo~ was rescheduled because of
its content, because it wasn't "an appropriate time" to present the
material.[2] As I indicated above, for me it was exactly the
appropriate time. And my initial reaction of disappointment remains
my final one. But I'm disappointed not only because I didn't get to
see the show when I wanted, but because the cancellation seemed to
trivialize (or at least to contain) the entire project of cutting-
edge art. By cancelling the performance, the Wexner effectively
communicated that provocative and radical theater can be mounted and
tolerated only when nothing serious is at stake. That to mount
provocative art — especially art which deals with disaster — when
something real IS at stake is somehow in bad taste. And that to raise
the question of the politics of taste — the fact that the whole
notion of bad taste is itself an ideologically inflected construct —
is also intolerable in the face of real crisis. This episode, then,
seemed to signal that art and theory both are reduced, in times of
crisis, "to an academic parlor game" — something we do when there's
nothing really on anyone's radar screen.[3] Something we do only when
it's "appropriate."


The question of the appropriate role and function of art post 9/11 is
one which has been framed largely in terms of taste. The removal of
Eric Fischl's commemorative sculpture, ~Tumbling Woman~, from
Rockefeller Center, the elimination of three choruses from John
Adams' opera ~The Death of Klinghoffer~ from a November 2001 Boston
Symphony program, and the quiet de-funding of work by performance
artist William Pope (he lost an NEA grant for a series of works on
racial and social injustice; the Andy Warhol Foundation magnanimously
stepped in and funded the exhibition) all were done in the name of
taste — the fear of offending the public in its still-sensitive,
post 9-11, traumatized state.


But as I have written elsewhere [4], questions of taste are never
ideologically neutral, and almost immediately the issue of taste in
post 9/11 cultural production began to overlap with heavy-handed
manifestations of political corporate and state power. Bill Maher's
television show, ~Politically Incorrect~, was taken off the air by
several ABC affiliates after Maher called the U.S violent response to
the 9/11 attacks "cowardly." John Lennon's song "Imagine" and all music
by Rage Against the Machine were placed on a "don't play" list by the
corporate giant Clear Channel. The woefully misnamed group "Students
for Academic Freedom" launched a number of websites, inviting
students to turn in professors who had made "anti-patriotic" remarks
in class and the U.S Legislature introduced a bill that would tie the
continued funding of area studies programs in American universities
(American Studies, Near Eastern Studies etc.) to governmental
"curriculum oversight." In the bill, renowned scholar Edward Said was
specifically named as the kind of thinker we have to guard against in
these troubled post 9/11 times. Finally, Steve Kurtz, founding member
of the Critical Art Ensemble, was arrested for bio-terrorism.

On US Troops to Haiti

Bill Fletcher, Jr.,TransAfrica Forum

Recent discussions about the pros and cons of a potential deployment of US
troops to Haiti, particularly given the support for such a movement by
so-called Interim (puppet) Prime Minister Latortue, ignore an important point:
had the opposition to democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide
not been in such a hurry to embrace undemocratic means to unseat him, Haiti
would not be looking at the disaster that it is now becoming.


Not only does the Latortue clique and the military thugs who directly overthrew
Aristide bear blame in the current situation, but so does the Bush
administration, a point that TransAfrica Forum and other friends of Haiti have
been making since the February 29, 2004 coup took place.

Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"French Fries"

Hoipolloi Cassidy, Woid

At least the New York Times got it right: the French are pervs. Of course this has been the American view for ages, ever since those nineteenth-century tales of caution in which innocent 'Murican farm-boys end up in Europe, only to be seduced by women, wine, and fabulous health benefits.

That's been the unanimous response of that sector of the American Right that passes for a center. The Times has been popping with outrage about the selfishness of those French voters who overwhelmingly rejected the proposed European Constitution last week — even one of its art critics joined in. The gist was, that the French are so selfish they insist on working only thirty-five hours in the week but that'll learn them when some day they're overwhelmed by Screaming Yellow Hordes willing to work thirty-five hours a day, eventually. Bad enough that French people actually enjoy sex: now they want satisfaction on the job as well. Instead of the race to the bottom promised by neo-liberalism they demand a race to the top. Garçon! Champagne!

T.M. Down writes:

"Selective Selling of Ideas in the U.S."

T. M. Down

If anything can be said about the prevailing culture in the United States, it is that commodities infiltrate every aspect of life. Indeed, Americans identify themselves most by those commodities they consume: music, cars, clothing, food, jewelry.

Although popularly characterized as the fleeting attribute of a youthful search for identity, such behavior still carries well into adulthood, and represents the core of identity by which most Americans define themselves. Commodities are so essential to identity in the United States, in fact, that mere ideas and beliefs have been transformed into commodities — traded, branded, sold and sanctioned.


In the United States, nothing is too sacred to be sold: from morality and religion to political ideology and patriotism, all are conveniently pre-packaged for consumption, stamped on T-shirts, bumper stickers and commercial advertisements conveniently disguised as news; that is, at least, those commodities that the establishment wishes to sell.

"The Philosopher and the Ayatollah"

Wesley Yang

In 1978, Michel Foucault went to Iran as a novice
journalist to report on the unfolding revolution. His
dispatches — now fully available in translation — shed
some light on the illusions of intellectuals in our
own time.


"It is perhaps the first great insurrection against
global systems, the form of revolt that is the most
modern and most insane." With these words, the French
philosopher Michel Foucault hailed the rising tide
that would sweep Iran's modernizing despot, Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi Shah, out of power in January 1979 and
install in his place one of the world's most illiberal
regimes, the Shi'ite government headed by Ayatollah
Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini.


Foucault wasn't just pontificating from an armchair in
Paris. In the fall of 1978, as the shah's government
tottered, he made two trips to Iran as a "mere novice"
reporter, as he put it, to watch events unfold. "We
have to be there at the birth of ideas," he explained
in an interview with an Iranian journalist, "the
bursting outward of their force; not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting this force,
in struggle carried on around ideas, for or against
them."


While many liberals and leftists supported the
populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against
one of the world's best-armed regimes, none welcomed
the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam
with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to
his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism.

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