Radical media, politics and culture.

Analysis & Polemic

January 4, 2004 - 4:31am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

hydrarchist writes:
Dark Matter, Las Agencias, and the Aesthetics
of Tactical Embarrassment (1)

Gregory G. Sholette

photo courtesy of Las Agencias
and Jordi Claremonte

In January and February
of 2003 the focus of mass media outlets around the world converged
upon a series of historically unprecedented street demonstrations
organized in opposition to the pending US war in Iraq. Estimates range
from six to ten million protesters left their homes and businesses
to occupy urban spaces in over sixty nations (2).
As unique as these events were however, one can find significant precedents
in an earlier cycle of mass demonstrations against global capitalism
organized by a wide range of activists from anarchists and eco-feminists
to militant labor unions and youthful Trotskyists as well as farmers,
house wives and "naked" people. As the artist Alan Sekula
described the memorable 1999 protestation against the World Trade
Organization

“There were moments
of civic solemnity, of urban anxiety, and of carnival. Again, something
very simple is missed by descriptions of this as a movement founded
in cyberspace: the human body asserts itself in the city streets against
the abstraction of global capital….”(3)
January 3, 2004 - 6:40am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Culture

Karl Fogel writes:

The Promise of a Post-Copyright World

Karl Fogel

There is one group of people not shocked by the record industry's
recent decision to sue randomly chosen file sharers: historians of
copyright. They already know what everyone else is slowly finding
out: that copyright was never about paying artists for their work, and
that far from being designed to support creators, copyright was
designed by and for distributors — that is,
publishers, which today includes record companies. But now that the
Internet has given us a world without distribution costs, it no longer
makes any sense to restrict sharing in order to pay for centralized
distribution. Abandoning copyright is now not only possible, but
desirable. Both artists and audiences would benefit, financially and
aesthetically. In place of corporate gatekeepers determining what can
and can't be distributed, a much finer-grained filtering process would
allow works to spread based on their merit alone. We would see a
return to an older and richer cosmology of creativity, one in which
copying and borrowing openly from others' works is simply a normal
part of the creative process, a way of acknowledging one's sources and
of improving on what has come before. And the old canard that artists
need copyright to earn a living would be revealed as the pretense it
has always been.

December 31, 2003 - 3:12am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes "Anonymous Comrade writes

Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom

Saul Newman

1. Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary poststructuralist thought.[1 ] Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner's critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the "poststructuralist" tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault's own development of the concept
in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigneheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault's own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices.[2 ] Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense--they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project--grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.

December 31, 2003 - 2:53am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

hydrarchist writes:

This is the third part of the essay. All footnotes are collected at the bottom of this segment.

Part I.

Part II.

THE COMPANY’S LOGIC

Let’s just say that we have fallen into the same productivity that capital expects from a worker, that it expected from a factory worker, except that now the factory is life and we almost never do anything that does not have a clear purpose, whose end has not already been determined. (Drift with language workers).

December 31, 2003 - 2:35am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Work

hydrarchist writes ... continued from Part I


MOBILITY

Mobility is the quality which best describes the present malleability of the work force around the three axes: time, space and task. Mobility in the disposition of rhythms and schedules, mobility between jobs and, beyond that, in geography, in vital decisions, in lifestyle, and mobility in ‘unit acts’ and in the ways of developing them, always subject to mutations, to processes of evaluation and adjustment, a constant auditing. Mobility opposed to the old staticness, to bureaucratization and routine and, without a doubt, to the organizational capacity of persons who in any moment may find their functions modified and recombined, persons who don’t know the limits of what they have to do, and in general, of what they themselves are.

December 31, 2003 - 1:59am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

hydrarchist writes:

"The Free Software Movement - Anarchism in Action"

by Asa Winstanley

* Introduction

The free software movement has been around in at least since 1984, but there is little awareness or debate about it in anarchist or general activist circles, beyond a vague awareness of "Linux". A theoretical anarchist analysis of the movement and the lessons we can learn from it seems to be conspicuous only by its absence. Yet this is a movement which is currently affecting a revolution in the way individuals, groups and companies use and create computer systems. I intend this piece to stimulate further debate, as there is currently little. Also, I am no expert in anarchist history or theory, so would be happy to receive criticism of the inevitable shortcomings in my comparisons.

December 17, 2003 - 11:41am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

"The World Is (Not) a Commodity"

Ernst Lohoff

The anti-globalization protest has formed as a movement against neoliberalism. Across the spectrum of protest, certainly the ideas on how the ruling order is to be critiqued differ widely. There is also not exactly consensus on how the path to a more humane society could look. But all realize that the neoliberal dream of a total market is a nightmare.

December 17, 2003 - 8:37am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Work

"Manifesto Against Labour"

Gruppe Krisis

1. The rule of dead labour

A corpse rules society -- the corpse of labour. All powers around the globe formed an alliance to defend its rule: the Pope and the World Bank, Tony Blair and Jörg Haider, trade unions and entrepreneurs, German ecologists and French socialists. They don't know but one slogan: jobs, jobs, jobs!

December 16, 2003 - 7:50pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
News

An anonymous coward writes:

"The New Model of Imperialism:

Saddam on Parade

Tariq Ali

My first reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein was both anger and
disgust. Anger with the old dictator who could not even die honourably. He
preferred to be captured by his old friends than to go down fighting, the
one decent thing he could have done for his country.

December 10, 2003 - 3:21pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
The State

An anonymous coward writes:

"When NGOs Attack:

Implications of the Coup in Georgia"

Jacob Levich

Nongovernmental organizations -- the notionally independent, reputedly
humanitarian groups known as NGOs -- are now being openly integrated into
Washington's overall strategy for consolidating global supremacy.

Events surrounding last month's coup in post-Soviet Georgia, read in light of
recent State Department documents, suggest that seemingly innocuous NGOs now
play a central role in the policy of US-engineered "regime change" set forth
in the notorious National Security Strategy of the United States.

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