Radical media, politics and culture.

Theory

September 21, 2003 - 11:12am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Depth Squad Distro writes:

AFTER 9/11: CONFORMISM, INSUBORDINATION, AND THE GOOD LIFE. AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK HOGAN

by Don LaCoss

DL: Your book, The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent (Duke UP), came out in May 2001. Since its publication, there have been a number of crucial incidents, both here in the US and around the world, which directly relate to some of the problems of “the new conformism” that your book explores. Do recent events change your thinking on “the new conformism,” or do you believe instead that they provide stronger support for your book’s arguments?

PH: In part, the book presents a general account of why people—all of us—consent to hegemonic or dominant practices, even when those practices clearly harm us or run against our interests. It develops that general account in terms of recent historical and cultural particulars. The particulars, obviously, vary. The basic principles, however, should be broadly valid. In other words, the scope of the book is not confined to the new conformism. Rather, the new conformism is a particularization of more widely applicable principles—a particularization that has pushed very strongly against the open rebelliousness that had developed in the 1960’s.

September 20, 2003 - 5:52pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Memory/System/Prediction"

Kurt Eckhart

"The anarchistic aim of the production of a post-scarcity society in toto hinges on the development and deployment of such technologies of non-scarcity. Emergent technologies such as 'fabbing' and nanotechnology will in essence make it possible to produce the real -- based on the internet's real-time and predictive data -- allowing a perfect fit of production and consumption. The abolishment of scarcity once and for all becomes possible. The goal of the anarchist syndicates must be to accelerate the creation and adoption of such technologies, turning each home from a site of consumption into a site of simulation-aided production. Each home must become not only a miniaturized ecology (though the use of infrastructural technologies) but also a miniaturized factory. Though this the autoproduction of the real becomes possible through the digital."


http://newworlddisorder.ca

September 20, 2003 - 5:39pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Nothing Natural///Black Planet"

Adrian Gargett

"War is not conceptualised here in Clausewitz's sense -- an implement of policy. War in its extremist sense is not an implement of any kind, and not in the slightest a political one. The comparison of war to politics is not -- in actuality -- one of methodological supplementary, but more exactly, one of the uncontested to the area of its possible circumscription. Only when it has been ordered/disciplined, and repressed in its tropism to total subjugation, can the miserable dog we understand as 'war' be suppressed to the influence of policy; as the negative force of the state. War breaks out of the Clausewitzean definition to embrace its wilder qualities; the cosmological nobility illustrated by Herakleitus, and the lines of hydraulic complexity traced by Sun Tzu. There is equally an inexorable signification in which war is beautiful -- particularly when contrasted to the sickening inanity of work -- given that even its desolate appearances overrun into something severe, flowing, and wild. War is an excessiveness of chances, which are fairly uniform with its shocking cruelty as a despised evil spirit trailing a grisly bloodbath, the gutter breeding-ground of vermin and contagion. Whatever its horrific fascination, there is nothing more overwhelmingly demeaning than war. It alone is truly base."


Full story: http://newworlddisorder.ca

September 5, 2003 - 2:10pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Great Divide: The Enlightenment and its Critics"

Stephen Eric Bronner

[From New Politics, vol. 5, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 19, Summer 1995.] Stephen Eric Bronner is a professor of political science at Rutgers University and a member of the New Politics editorial board.

Max Weber already envisioned the spirit of Enlightenment "irretrievably fading" and a world in which there would remain only "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart."1 But he was bitter about this development, which places him in marked contrast to much of contemporary opinion. The Enlightenment, of course, always had its critics. Beginning with the Restoration of 1815 and the new philosophical reaction to the French Revolution, however, they were almost exclusively political -- if not necessarily cultural -- adherents of the right: intelligent conservatives committed to organic notions of development like Edmund Burke, elitists seeking a return to the sword and the robe like Joseph de Maistre, racists intent on viewing world history as a battle between aryans and Jews like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and apocalyptics prophesying doom like Oswald Spengler.

September 1, 2003 - 11:24am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"Chomsky and Foucault on Human Nature"

A Discussion Moderated by Fons Elders

Excerpts from a 1971 discussion between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault,
from "Human Nature: Justice Versus Power," in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind edited by Fons Elders (Souvenir Press, 1974).

ELDERS: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third debate of the International Philosophers' Project. Tonight's debaters are Mr. Michel Foucault, of the College de France, and Mr. Noam Chomsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both philosophers have points in common and points of difference. Perhaps the best way to compare both philosophers would be to see them as through a mountain working at opposite sides of the same mountain with different tools, without even knowing if they are working in each other's direction.

August 31, 2003 - 11:11am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Notes on Summits and Counter-Summits:

The Illusion of a Center"

Capitalism is a social relationship and not a citadel for the powerful. It is starting from this banality that one can confront the question of summits and counter-summits. Representing capitalist and state domination as a kind of general headquarters (it’s a question of the G8, the WTO or some other such organization) is useful to those who would like to oppose that managing center with another center: the political structures of the so-called movement, or better, their spokespeople. In short, it is useful to who propose merely a change in management personnel. Besides being reformist in essence and purpose, this logic becomes collaborationist and authoritarian in method, as it leads to centralization of the opposition.

August 28, 2003 - 10:46am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade submits:

Giorgio Agamben. Stato di eccezione.

Torino: Bollati Borighieri. 2003

Brett Neilson
University of Western Sydney

Review by Brett Neilson (University of Western Sydney)

At a time when Australians face trial before U.S. military tribunals,
asylum seekers languish in camps like Baxter and Nauru, and new government
legislation allows the detention of Australian citizens themselves, the
prose of Giorgio Agamben burns with relevance for those who live on the
southern continent. Stato di eccezione is Agamben's latest offering, an
extension and deepening of Homo sacer (1995)--of which it announces itself
as Volume II, Part 1. Growing more directly from this earlier text than
Quel che resta di Auschwitz (1998), Volume III of Homo sacer, the book is
at once more historically grounded and more politically audacious. Agamben
steps away from the pessimistic analytic of 'bare life' to recover some of
the redemptive energy that inhabits La communità che viene (1990), his
best-known work among English language readers. Perhaps it is the force
with which emergency powers have gripped the world in the past two years
that lends Stato di eccezione a political intensity that remains wholly
current even as it interrogates Roman republican law and plummets the
ontological depths of early 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and
Walter Benjamin.

August 26, 2003 - 2:53pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Antasofia writes: "Here is an interview with Noam Chomsky in which he speaks about the relation between intellectuals and the dominion of the new world order, criticizing intellectuals such as Foucault and Negri."



"The Dominion and The Intellectuals"

Antasofia Interviews Noam Chomsky


Q: Last year we worked on a seminar, made by the students, called Genealogy of Dominion. We studied Max Stirner, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Etienne De la Boetie and Hannah Arendt. I worked on Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. He believes language has a disciplinary effect that through the words goes straight to ideology. So for Stirner, you have to free yourself from this kind of language and have a personal rebellion, not a revolution. This is something different from your language conception that is free and creative. I want to know what you think about that.

August 17, 2003 - 2:11pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Kumquat submits:

"The Discourse of History"

Roland Barthes


Translated by Stephen Bann. Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981): 7-20. Pagination, superscripts, and accents are not preserved. Please see source for the final three notes.


The formal description of sets of words beyond the level of the sentence (what we call for convenience discourse) is not a modern development: from Gorgias to the nineteenth century, it was the special concern of traditional rhetoric. Recent developments in the science of language have nonetheless endowed it with a new timeliness and new methods of analysis: a linguistic description of discourse can perhaps already be envisaged at this stage; because of its bearings on literary analysis (whose importance in education is well known) it is one of the first assignments for semiology to undertake.

August 17, 2003 - 12:22pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Kumquat submits:


An Interview with Sadie Plant

Brett Stalbaum and Geri Wittig

(Sadie Plant is Research Fellow and Director of the Cybernetic Culture
Research Unit at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture and The Most Radical Gesture :
The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age.)

Brett Stalbaum/Geri Wittig: Your work tends to
challenge hierarchical orthodoxies in their varied
cultural manifestations, but your approach doesn't
challenge them with replacement hierarchies, but
rather with distributed models. How does this strategy
relate to emerging electronic activism?

Pages

Subscribe to Theory