Radical media, politics and culture.

Analysis & Polemic

May 3, 2004 - 3:23pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Historian With a History"

Jon Wiener, LA Times

The nominee for U.S. archivist has a penchant for dubious methods.


Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.


It's a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation's most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the federal hierarchy, but, as its website notes, the National Archives is not simply "a dusty hoard of ancient history. It is a public trust on which our democracy depends. It enables people to inspect for themselves the record of what government has done."

May 3, 2004 - 12:32pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Rants

"The Midnight Fathers"

Ken McLeod

It's late. Your wife, or husband perhaps, is out or away somewhere or gone to bed before you. The kids are in bed, or out, or away. For now, you're alone. There may be a small glass of whisky on the table. Tobacco, or some stronger leaf, smoulders in the ashtray. Some voice that speaks to your darker or quieter moments plays low on the sound system. The television is off. Definitely off. The newspaper is crumpled, the novel has no savour. You prowl the bookshelves, hunker down, run your finger over the dust of forgotten corners. Your glance alights on a lean volume or skinny pamphlet; your fingertip tugs it out. Blow the dust, sneeze, flick over pages that once seemed cogent.

May 3, 2004 - 10:57am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"Capital's Noosphere"

Jurrian Bendien, Marxmail


Various authors, presumably working from Bank of
International Settlements data, suggest the value of the global stock of
financial assets since 1980 has increased more than twice as fast as GDP, in
rich countries. The average daily trading volume in the currency markets is
now supposed to be between $1.1 and $1.5 trillion or so, suggesting in
approximate figures an annual turnover of $280-$390 trillion or so per year.

May 3, 2004 - 9:46am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

"The New Surveillance"

Sonia K. Katyal

Abstract
A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual
property owners — such as record companies, software owners, and
publishers — were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home
in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet,
today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each
strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the
paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and
creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression — a virtual
marketplace of ideas — alongside an insurmountable array of capacities
for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and
silences speech, often simultaneously.

May 3, 2004 - 8:16am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

Frank Wallis writes:

"Freedom, God, and George W. Bush"

Frank Wallis

I keep hearing a familiar refrain from George W. Bush: freedom is from God, not from man.

"Liberty is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here on Earth. The progress of liberty is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost. The success of freedom is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the choices and the courage of free peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice. In the trenches of World War I, through a two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty." (Speech at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, 6 Nov. 2003)

One can only witness in wonderment what Bush means by "our willingness to sacrifice for liberty". GIs were sacrificed, but who made the decision to send them to war? Rich people who partied at night while poor men were being blown to bits on the battlefield.

May 2, 2004 - 3:10pm -- nolympics
Analysis & Polemic
In the Streets

Ernest EverHard writes

MAYDAZE!


A thesis on the Celebration of Alienation


(originally written in the 1970s)

This is supposed to be a celebration, but there is a stale scent about it - the scent of failure held up as success, of moldy platitudes held up as useful, critical ideas - the scent of an old, dying world, not the fresh air of a new one. Once again people come together because, deep down, all of them are fed up with their present existence; all of them want a life of unstifled tenderness, free creativity, limitless adventure. And once again, the Left, like the constipated rhinoceros it is, has managed after immense grunting and straining to produce the same dry, evil-smelling little pellets of slogans:


                            Jobs or Income Now!

                                  No Wage Cuts

                    No Cuts in Social Services

                        Fight Police Repression

Never mind that a movement which could enforce the granting of even one of the first three demands would be easily strong enough to overthrow capitalism... let's just keep on pestering Mommy and Daddy.

April 29, 2004 - 11:31am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

hydrarchist writes:


"A Global Sense of Place"

David Garcia

A Report from the Eterea 2
Meeting of Italian Tactical Television Makers. From March 25-28th, 2004 the second major gathering of the Telestreets took place
in Sennegallia.
Here are some notes from a short visit to the world of Telestreets.

Background

Telestreet, the latest wave in the rich history of Italian media activism,
has been fairly widely reported on this list and elswhere but some of the
basics are worth revisiting briefly.

Telestreets are semie-legal micro-broadcasters, literally street TV makers
using small transmitters to send programes that mostly reach no more than a
few blocks. Telestreets range from making their own local items to capturing
the programming (such as big football matches) from the commercial satellite
operators and re-broadcasting them for free on Telestreet networks.

April 29, 2004 - 10:18am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

hydrarchist writes

"The Spaces of a Cultural Question"


E-mail interview with Brian Holmes by Marion von Osten in preparation of
"Atelier EUROPA. A small post-fordistic drama." opening at 2nd of April
2004 in the Munich Kunstverein.

Marion: You are editing the next issue of Multitudes on cultural and
creative labor. Can you explain why and out of what perspective you look
on cultural labor and creative work, i.e. do you think it is possible to
explain the inner dynamics of post-Fordist production modes due to this
specific form of work and its conditions?

Brian: Actually we have prepared what is called the "minor" of Multitudes
15 on the theme of "creativity at work." The basic notion of immaterial
labor is that the manipulation of information, but also the interplay of
affects, have become central in the contemporary working process even in
the factories, but much more so in the many forms of language-, image- and
ambiance-production. Workers can no longer be treated like Taylorist
gorillas, exploited for their purely physical force; the "spirit of the
worker" has to come down onto the factory floor, and from there it can
gain further autonomy by escaping into the flexible work situations
developing on the urban territory. These notions have made it through to
mainstream sociology, and several authors have taken artistic production
as the model for the new managerial techniques and ideologies of
contemporary capitalism, with all its inequality, self-exploitation and
exclusion. The most recent example is Pierre Menger's "Portrait de
l'artiste en travailleur" ["Portrait of the Artist as a Worker"]. We don't
see it exactly that way. Of course the individualization of innovative
work practices exposes people to flexible management; and linguistic and
affective labor is vital to the capitalist economy in terms of shaping the
mind-set in which a commodity can become desirable. But we also focus on
the real autonomy that people have gained. This is why we have devoted the
"major" of the issue to activist art practices, and the theme of "research
for the outside." We're also very interested in the ongoing struggle of
the part-time cinema and theater workers in France, concerning the special
unemployment status which they have won since 1969, which provides a
supplemental income making it possible to live an artist's life in an
efficiency-oriented capitalist society. The right-wing, neoliberal
government of Raffarin wants to dismantle this unemployment regime,
because they know that those who benefit are actively producing another
ideal of society.

April 28, 2004 - 9:31pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"For A Justice To Come:

An Interview with Jacques Derrida"

Lieven De Cauter

[The Brussells Tribunal is a commission of inquiry into the “New Imperial Order”, and more particularly into the “Project for A New American Century” (PNAC), the neo-conservative think tank that has inspired the Bush government’s war logic. The co-signatories of the PNAC “mission statement” include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. The programme of this think tank is to promote planetary hegemony on the basis of a supertechnological army, to prevent the emergence of a rival super-power and to take pre-emptive action against all those who threaten American interests. The Brussells Tribunal was held in Brussels from April 14 through 17, 2004. Jacques Derrida, who suffers from cancer and was unable to attend the tribunal, invited the project’s initiator, Lieven De Cauter, to his house for an interview.]

Lieven De Cauter: While thanking you for your generosity — why have you decided to grant us this interview on our initiative, the “Brussells Tribunal”?

Jacques Derrida: First of all I wanted to salute your initiative in its principle: to resuscitate the tradition of a Russell Tribunal is symbolically an important and necessary thing to do today. I believe that, in its principle, it is a good thing for the world, even if only in that it feeds the geopolitical reflection of all citizens of the world. I am even more convinced of this necessity in light of the fact that, for a number of years now, we have witnessed an increased interest in the working, in the constitution of international institutions, institutions of international law which, beyond the sovereignty of States, judge heads of State, generals. Not yet States as such, precisely, but persons responsible for, or suspected of being responsible for, war crimes, crimes against humanity — one could mention the case of Pinochet, despite its ambiguity, or of Milosevic. At any rate, heads of State have to appear as such before an International Criminal Court, for instance, which has a recognised status in international law, despite all the difficulties you know: the American, French, Israeli reservations. Nonetheless this tribunal exists, and even if it is still faltering, weak and problematic in the execution of its sanctions, it exists as a recognised phenomenon of international law.

April 28, 2004 - 1:54pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

"Splendid Little War; Long Bloody Occupation:

Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson"

William Loren Katz, April 28, 2004

Weapons of mass distruction, a slam-dunk war followed by a
no-end-in-sight occupation? We've been here before when a century ago
the U.S. first sent an army overseas to accomplish regime change and
liberate a resource-rich land from tyranny.


It began in February, 1898 when an explosion sunk the U.S. battleship
Maine in Havana harbor. Since Cubans lived under a cruel Spanish
colonialism, a pro-war U.S. press felt free to claim that Spain
unleashed a weapon of mass destruction, and to whip up "Remember the
Maine" fever. No weapon was ever found — it was a boiler explosion that
sank the Maine — and though Spain agreed to President McKinley's main
demands, Congress declared war with a promise to free Cuba.

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