"A Rift in Empire?

The Multitudes in the Face of War"

Brian Holmes

The February 15 [2003] antiwar demonstrations proved it: the self-organization of free singularities is possible on a planetary scale. And that was an event, despite all that followed. In a manifesto-text written just after those demonstrations, I used the language of Negri and Hardt to say that the multitudes could create a rift in Empire. In a context where the Aristocracy (the great transnational companies) had been weakened by a string of financial disasters, where the Monarchy (the political and military command of the earth) had fallen apart in serious dissension, I wanted to encourage the democratic action of the Plebe, against the scorn of the American, British, Spanish and Italian leaders. It was a moment that had multiplied the world's political stages, overflowing the traditional mechanisms of representation.

"Net Culture:

Culture Between Conformity and Resistance"

Wolfgang Schirmacher

The human individual is a cultural being that with the aid of linguistic symbols creates a world not provided for by nature. We are ‘artificial by nature,’ as the philosophical anthropologist Hellmuth Plessner emphasized, and our cultural achievement consists in technological ingenuity, in the constructs of institutions; it reveals itself ideally in media and art. With culture we create a human sphere and establish realms of private and public encounter. In the last few years a cultural phenomenon has developed with the Internet which seeks its equal in history in its intellectual consequence and incomparable power to generate and foster communal belonging. Not even in their golden ages did the world religions possess such global force of attraction, allowing a world culture to hold sway and rendering regional differences obsolete. In the Internet, cultural imagination meets with the material conditions of many varied societies and transcends these. The long dominant difference between public and private sphere has been suspended, and the Internet has become the universal venue of encounter. The functioning of society at a very basic level is affected here, one which usually escapes our attention. The cultural change effected through the new media cannot be overestimated, but it is yet uncertain where it will lead.

Anonymous Comrade writes

"The President from Podunk Drilling Inc."

John Chuckman, January 15, 2004

Thinking people aren't surprised to be told that failed-oilman George Bush qualifies as a moral and intellectual dry hole.

Bush's halting words come from a mouth so long smugly-set it can scarcely form the shapes of vowels, but enormous ignorance also manages to come through. Still, it never hurts to have a first-hand account, expert testimony, to reinforce even our strongest perceptions, and former Bush Cabinet-member Paul O'Neill has now supplied that in spades.