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Analysis & Polemic

November 25, 2002 - 10:05am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Independent Media

South Asia Citizens Web writes:

""The Foreign Exchange of Hate: IDRF and the American Funding of Hindutva"
By Sabrang Communications (India)

and South Asia Citizens Web (France)

20 November 2002

A detailed investigative report on the use of American corporate funds by the US-based India Development and Relief Fund to promote the projects of Hindu supremacist groups in India.

November 24, 2002 - 11:57am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"The Ontological Status

of Conspiracy Theory"

Hakim Bey

(for Kevin Coogan)

Is conspiracy theory a delusion of the Right which has infected the Left as well? Leftist Conspiracy Theorists sometimes make uncritical use of the texts of Rightest Conspiracy Theorists-delving into the work of the Liberty Lobby for JFK Assassination tidbits, picking up Birchist notions about the CFR/Bilderberg/Rockefeller "liberal" internationalists, etc., etc. Since anti-semitism can be found on the Left as well as the Right, echoes of the Protocols may be heard from both directions. Even some anarchists are attracted to "Historical Revisionism". Anticapitalism or economic populism on the Right has its counterpoint on the Left in "Red Fascism", which broke the surface of History in the Hitler/Stalin Pact, and has come back to haunt us in the bizarre European "Third Wave" amalgamation of Right and Left extremism, a phenomenon which emerges in the USA in the libertine nihilism and "satanism" of anarcho-fascist groups like Amok Press and Radio Werewolf -- and conspiracy theory plays a big role in all these ideologies.

November 23, 2002 - 9:00pm -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Race Politics

dr.woooo writes "An Engagement with the Real:
a dialogue between ben and claire

We were encamped in an isolated location, like a bunch of contestants in a reality TV show, and in some way those parameters forced us to make contact with our material context. For those of us outside the concentration camp there was no escaping the fact that a bunch of people were locked up behind razor wire, very close. We had come to make contact and to contribute to the creation of freedom. Disengagement was not an option. Nobody could be a bystander.

This dialogue was born in various debriefing, late-night phone conversations between us that occurred after the Easter Woomera 2002 protests. We wanted to capture on paper our thoughts about the significance of the protests and what could be taken from them. We came to the Woomera protests from very different starting points. Claire had been involved in the "refugee campaign" for the past year with groups like the Refugee Action Collective and No One Is Illegal and had visited Woomera twice before. Ben felt like he'd just been "rent-a-crowd" at rallies. We felt, along with everyone else, that Woomera was very significant both personally and politically, but why? We also felt, like many people, that the Woomera protests should not be overly fetishised, but what would this mean exactly? This is by no means an attempt at a definitive piece. There are big black holes because maybe some of this stuff cannot be theorised outside of particular contexts. We wanted to throw out some ideas, ask some questions and perhaps begin a dialogue.

November 18, 2002 - 2:21pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Postscript on the Societies of Control"

Gilles Deleuze


1. Historical

Foucault located the _disciplinary societies_ in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the
outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast
spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one
closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the
family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then
the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory;
from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent
instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves
as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine
of Rossellini's _Europa '51_ could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing
convicts."

November 18, 2002 - 1:41pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Desire and Pleasure"

Gilles Deleuze

(Translated by Melissa McMahon)

"Editorial Foreword"

By Francois Ewald 1

The following text is not just unpublished. There is something intimate, secret, confidential about it. It consists of a series of notes -- classed from A to H -- that Gilles Deleuze had entrusted to me in order that I give them to Michel Foucault. It was in 1977.

November 18, 2002 - 11:34am -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Mainstream Media

smygo writes:

"Fear is only another form of awareness and awareness is
only a form of love. Total fear is total awareness. Once you
give in to fear completely, it ceases to exist, and all
that's left is awareness. All that's left is love."
--Charles Manson

"George Bush's Big Brother"

Jonathan Turley, LATimes November 17, 2002

Orwell would recognize the plan to monitor citizens using
databases.

In George Orwell's book "1984," the government used
"doublespeak" to change the meaning of words to make the
horrific appear commonplace. Thus the war department was
called the Ministry of Love, and citizens were instructed
that "slavery is freedom."

November 17, 2002 - 4:20pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

saeed writes: "This is from

Le Monde diplomatique -- November 2002

"Terrorism Is Society's Condemnation of Itself"

Jean Baudrillard

The despair of having everything

The West's mission is to make the world's wealth of cultures
interchangeable, and to subordinate them within the global
order. Our culture, which is bereft of values, revenges
itself upon the values of other cultures.

Is globalisation inevitable? What fervour propels the
world to embrace such an abstract idea? And what force
drives us to make that idea a reality so unconditionally?

November 15, 2002 - 10:16am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Technology

hydrarchist writes "This article was published in the Make World Magazine.


The resurgent question of the intellectuals hides the contemporary
problem of "what is to be done?", the problem of the auto-organisation
of cognitive labour. Space has re-emerged for the question
of the intellectuals, in the discussion of the Italian left. But the
question is badly posed, and the word itself (intellectual) elaborates
extremely badly the contemporary socio-mental geography.


Social entropy and
recombination

Franco Bifo Berardi

Lenin related to the figure of the intellectual
the problem of what to do, in the political
direction of the collective action. The intellectuals
are not a social class, they do not have
specific social interests to sustain. They are generally
the expression of parasitical income, they
can make "purely intellectual" choices, making
themselves out to be the means of revolutionary
consciousness. In this sense they are what is
most similar to the pure becoming of the spirit, in
the Hegelian development of self-consciousness.
On the other hand, the workers whilst being the
bearers of a homogenous social interest, can not
pass from the purely economic state (the Hegelian
in itself) to the politically conscious state
(the for itself of self consciousness) only through
the political form of the party which embodies
and hands down the philosophical heritage (the
proletariat as heirs of classical German philosophy)

November 14, 2002 - 10:37pm -- jim
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

"Remaking Social Practices" (1)

by Felix Guattari

The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to
us by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing
is any longer of real consequence. We cover our eyes; we forbid ourselves
to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thrusts
far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living
that are still fresh in our minds, and which slaps our future onto an
opaque horizon, heavy with thick clouds and miasmas. We depend all the
more on the reassurance that nothing is assured.

November 14, 2002 - 8:01am -- hydrarchist
Analysis & Polemic
Theory

hydrarchist writes "This essay was recently republished in Make World 2, Magazine.


Nothing appears so enigmatic today as the question of what it
means to act. This issue seems both enigmatic and out of reach--
up in the heavens, one might say. If nobody asks me what political
action is, I seem to know; but if I have to explain it to somebody
who asks, this presumed knowledge evaporates into incoherence.
And yet what notion is more familiar in people's everyday speech
than action? Why has the obvious become clothed in mystery?
Why is it so puzzling?


Virtuosity and
Revolution,
The Political
Theory of Exodus


Paolo Virno


According to a long tradition
of thought, the realm of political action can
be defined fairly precisely by two boundaries. The
first relates to labor, to its taciturn and instru-mental
character, to that automatism that makes
of it a repetitive and predictable process. The
second relates to pure thought, to the solitary
and non-appearing quality of its activity. Political
action is unlike labor in that its sphere of inter-vention
is social relations, not natural materials.
It modifies the context within which it is inscribed,
rather than creates new objects to fill it.
Unlike intellectual reflection, action is public,
geared to exteriorization, to contingency, to the
hustle and bustle of the multitude.

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