Radical media, politics and culture.

Theory

July 24, 2002 - 10:41am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Sergio Fiedler c/o Dr Wooo writes

"The National or the Global:

Between “the People” and "the Multitude"

Sergio Fiedler

University of Technology Sydney

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Nationalism and Globalism Conference

15-16 July, 2002

Abstract

As pointed out by Michael Hardt in his report on the Porto Alegre Social Forum, the tension between national and global responses to globalisation remains one of the main questions dividing the movement against neo-liberalism in different parts of the world today. This paper discusses the relationship between nationalism and globalism in reference to the notions of “the people” and "the multitude," and why the national has been surpassed as main arena of anti-systemic struggle by the global character of social movements themselves. Moreover, it highlights the need to create a counter-empire of the multitude as a response to global corporate and military power, rather than retreat to nationalism.

July 17, 2002 - 6:57am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes:

The following essay was recently published by the Bureau d'Etudes and subsequently translated by Brian Holmes. The Bureau d'Etudes operate the Research center about autonomous knowledge and power.

autonomous knowledge and power

in a society without affects


(introduction)

Walking through cities connected to world distribution networks, we shift from one
imaginary to the next, from Monoprix™ to UGC™, from Friskies™ to the Guggenheim™
or Pinault™ foundations to MacDonald's™. Each time we activate fields of relational,
communicational or sensational possibilities, equivalent and interchangeable. The
commodity-possibilities© offered by world supermarket culture are born of desires
and needs conjured up by advertising and the media. They can only be actualized with
the money we have at our disposal, through our work and our credit at the bank. The
richest has a good chance of being right, because he's got the cash for it. He can
create his own commodity-possibilities©, and impose them on everyone else. An
equation associating truth, money, technology and power takes form: it allows you
to work on your own indoctrination, your own subjection. Foucault speaks of "regimes
of truth" by which he means the self-tightening circle in which the subjection
of individuals and the production of subjectifying truths reinforce one another.
July 1, 2002 - 10:32pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes :

Spinoza's
Anti-Modernity


Antonio Negri


Translated by Charles
T. Wolfe. This article first appeared in Les Temps Modernes 46:539
(June 1991). It is printed in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume
18, Number 2, 1995. Hacked from it is printed form and publicized by korotonomedya
in May 2002.

1. Spinoza, the Romantic


The paradox marking Spinoza's
reappearance in modernity is well known. If Mendelssohn wished to "give
him new credence by bringing him closer to the philosophical orthodoxy of
Leibniz and Wolff," and Jacobi, "by presenting him as a heterodox
figure in the literal sense of the term, wanted to do away with him definitively
for modern Christianity"—well, "both failed in their goal,
and it was the heterodox Spinoza who was rehabilitated."1 The Mendelssohn-Jacobi
debate can be grafted onto the crisis of a specific philosophical model. It
generates a figure of Spinoza capable of assuaging the exacerbated spiritual
ten­sion of that epoch, and of constituting the systematic preamble of
the relation between power and substance—between subject and nature.
Spinoza, the damned Spinoza, had a resurgence in modernity as a Romantic philosopher.
Lessing won out by recognizing in Spinoza an idea of nature which was capable
of balancing the relation between feeling and intellect, freedom and necessity,
and history and reason. Herder and Goethe, against the subjective and revolutionary
impa­tience of the Sturm und Drang, based themselves on this powerful
image of synthesis and recomposed objectivity: Spinoza is not only the figure
of Romanticism; he constitutes its grounding and its fulfillment.

June 27, 2002 - 4:29pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes

"Alma Venus:
Prolegomena to the Common"

Antonio Negri


This essay is excerpted from a work entitled "Kairos Alma Venus Multitude. Nove
lezioni impartite a me stesso" ("Nine Lectures on What I Have Taught Myself") (Rome:
Manifesto libri, 2000). Thus, certain notions, e.g., kairos, were introduced in earlier
chapters of the work. It is published in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume
22, Number 1, 2000, New York and hacked by korotonomedya into html in April 2002.


1. The guiding light of materialism is the eternity of matter. The eternal is the common
name of the materialist experience of time. From an ethical standpoint, the problem
faced by materialism is to hold sin¡gularity responsible for the eternal. These truths
stemming from the materialist tradition are confirmed in the experience of kairos.

May 22, 2002 - 9:39am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Michael Hardt Interview, "New Forms of Power"

Zagreb Interview with Michael Hardt

by Ognjen Strpic

[broadcast on Croatian Radio, Third Program, 12. 5. 2002]

While we wait for the publishing of the Croatian translation of Hardt-Negri's
Empire, Michael Hardt visited Zagreb, where he gave two lectures,
organized
by past.forward (theory module of net-club mama) and performing arts
magazine Frakcija. Between the lectures, we talked about some of the
less
discussed aspects of their work in Empire.

May 18, 2002 - 2:14pm -- Uncle Fluffy
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes "

Anti-Capitalism or State Capitalism?


Black Flag Anti-Capitalist Special


A new movement has appeared, one which has made a name for itself in its militancy, its willingness to consider alternatives to the status quo, to accept with pride the name "anti-capitalist."


Sadly, Globalise Resistance is not part of that movement. Eschewing any explicit anti-capitalist label, it claims to be "a network of groups opposed to the global growth of corporate power." It is a "central organising goal of unity-in-diversity among the anti-globalisation, environmental, anti-privatisation and human rights movements." No mention of anti-capitalism.

May 12, 2002 - 9:29pm -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
Theory


Aggy k & And writes "Recent years have seen the large growth of northern social movements resisting capital and corporate globalisation - often focusing on international trade regulation bodies and increasingly on borders and freedom of movement. In much overseas commentary these movements have been regarded as demonstrating a marked shift from 'traditional' methods of organising. This shift is from hierarchical and bureaucratic methods of organisation to more decentralised and participatory models.


The goal of autonomous movements is to transcend nation states, not capture them. - George Katsiaficas

May 6, 2002 - 8:40am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes


Extracts from

WHOSE ASTRONAUTS?

Imagination and the Multitudes in Italy in the Days of the Global Cacerolazo

by Wu Ming, February 2002



[the following essay was featured in /Giap/ - 2nd Series - #7, February 10th,
2002. It was reviewed by French magazine Les Inrockuptibles <http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/rasse gna/inrockuptibles_wm.html>]





It is true that the "movement of the movements" - albeit sorely-tried - has
survived the 2001 butcheries of Genoa, Gothenburg etc. Indeed, it has started
over in spite of the many attempts at wiping it out, in Italy and possibly
the rest of the planet.

It is true that even September 11th and the following Fifth Reich ideological
flocking failed to stop the mobilization of myriads of people. Indeed, the
opposition to the enduring global war provided one more reason to take the
streets and organize.  

It is true that millions of exiles from the old "official" left are crowding
on the borders of this manifold movement. These people are demanding to take
part, they need issues, ideas, words and action to restore their hope in the
opposition to the present and allow them to figure out the future.

It's all true. That's why we have found ourselves facing a lot of new problems.


The first and bigger one is the problem of imagination, i.e. the relationship
between this movement's imagery and its imagination, the way the movement
thinks of itself and the way it figures out that new, possible world it talks
about [...]

So far, nobody has managed to interpret the multitude. At best we managed
to evoke the multitude, as happened in Genoa [July 2001], always semi-consciously,
the way apprentice sorcerers do.

April 30, 2002 - 2:05pm -- nomadlab
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anonymous Comrade writes "This is a technical critique of Mike Albert's theory, I point out the positive aspects of his reinterpretation of Marxism, then tell what I think is wrong, and then offer a few suggestions for viewing his contribution in context of what I've said. This is technical but hopefully not BS

The article's legitmacy depends on the truthfulness of a certain type of perspectivism,
but I really hope that it rises above what latter day Nietszcheans have produced. But like them it focusses a lot on the roots of the percieved problems, hopefully the roots are not contradicted too much by the leaves, as it were.

April 26, 2002 - 3:22am -- Stenglander
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

Anti-Capitalism as Ideology...and as Movement (Part Two)

The "movement" according to the traditional left[44]

One of the features of the scene out of which the "anti-capitalist
movement" germinated in Britain was the relative absence of the organized
left - in particular, the absence of the largest Trotskyist sect in
Britain, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). If Trotskyist groups can
be situated on a spectrum of purism to opportunism, the SWP can clearly
be located at the opportunist end. Any hint of a movement or campaign
developing in response to a state attack, a rise in racism, a war
or whatever, is met by an effort to set up or promote a front by the
SWP. However, efforts to relate at a local level to anti-roads and
similar campaigns fell flat, and their setting up of a front against
the Criminal Justice Bill (CJB) in 1994 also met with little success.[45]

Pages

Subscribe to Theory