"Business As Usual"

Tariq Ali, The Guardian, Saturday May 24, 2003

Unsurprisingly, the UN security council has capitulated completely,
recognised the occupation of Iraq and approved its re-colonisation by the US
and its bloodshot British adjutant. The timing of the mea culpa by the
"international community" was perfect. Yesterday, senior executives from
more than 1,000 companies gathered in London to bask in the sunshine of the
re-established consensus under the giant umbrella of Bechtel, the American
empire's most favoured construction company. A tiny proportion of the loot
will be shared.

"The Google AdWords Happening"

Christophe Bruno, April 2002

How to lose money with your art ?

At the beginning of April, a debate took place on rhizome.org mailing list, about how to earn money with net art. It suggested to me an answer to an easier problem : how to spend money with my art (if you understand everything on how to spend money, you should in principle understand also how to earn money, because of conservation laws...)

I decided to launch a happening on the web, consisting in a poetry advertisement campaign on Google AdWords . I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little "poems", non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative.

I began with the keyword "symptom".

Anonymous Comrade submits:

"Of Blair, Hussein and Genocide"

John Chuckman, May 19, 2003

Britain's Prime Minister Blair has now claimed that the war in Iraq was justified by the discovery of mass graves. The ugly truth is that mass graves have become pretty common things since the beginning of the twentieth century, although many of the world's most savage and horrific acts left no such evidence, as in the case of America's napalming, carpet-bombing and throat-cutting millions in Vietnam.

"Dossier: Scattered Speculations on Value"

Toni Negri

Introduction by Ronald Judy

In the spring of 1996, Marcia Landy and I organized a boundary 2 panel for the annual Rethinking Marxism conference held in Amherst, Massachusetts, in December of that year. We thought that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's speculation on the relationship between value and affect ("Scattered Speculations") afforded an opportunity for rigorous engagement with these concepts, their historical significance, and their viability for understanding the emerging social formations attending the global economy. We envisioned a format of collective discussion carried out through individual papers and followed by an open discussion with Professor Spivak. Among those who agreed to join in this Sprechstimme were Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Reda Bensmaia, and Etienne Balibar. Unforeseen circumstances prevented Professors Spivak and Bensmaia from taking part. Through the graciousness of Hardt and Balibar, however, the panel went ahead. We never planned for Negri to come, given his well-known political predicament -- although at the time he was free in Paris, he could not enter the United States. Still, he prepared and sent a paper that Hardt translated from the Italian and I read aloud, to which Balibar gave an informed and engaging response. Negri's paper and Hardt's talk follow in these pages. (They expand on these notions in their forthcoming book, Empire.) Despite the absence of two colleagues, the event was well received. We owe sincere thanks to those who attended the session. We want to thank Stephen Cullenberg for giving us the opportunity to present our conversation in the venue of the Rethinking Marxism conference. We are most grateful to Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Our debt to Hardt and Negri is compounded by their agreeing to allow us to publish their papers in this issue of boundary 2.