Politicizing Sadness

Colectivo Situaciones

More than five years after the insurrection of that Argentine December
of 2001 we bear witness to the changing interpretations and moods around
that event. For many of us sadness was the feeling that accompanied a
phase of this winding becoming. This text rescues a moment in the
elaboration of "that sadness" in order to go beyond the notions of
"victory and defeat" that belong to that earlier cycle of politicization
which centered on taking state power, and, at the same time, in order to
share a procedure that has allowed us to "make public" an intimate
feeling of people and groups.

Sadness arrived after the event: the political fiesta — of languages,
images, and movements — was followed by a reactive, dispersive dynamic.
And, along with it, there arrived what was later experienced as a
reduction of the capacities of openness and innovation that the event
brought into play. The experience of social invention (which always also
implies the invention of time) was followed by a moment of normalization
and the declaration of "end of the fiesta." According to Spinoza,
sadness consists in being separated from our powers (potencias). Among
us political sadness often took the form of impotence and melancholy in
the face of the growing distance between that social experiment and the
political imagination capable of carrying it out.

A Video Interview with Peter Linebaugh

Counterviews

The short Counterviews video interview, "A Walk with Peter Linebaugh," by Tao Ruspoli, may be accessed here.

Torrents of Desire and the Shape of the Information Landscape

Felix Stalder

We are in the midst an uneven shift from an information environment
characterized by scarcity of cultural goods to one characterized
by their abundance. Until very recently, even privileged people
had access to a relatively limited number of news sources, books,
audio recordings, films and other forms of informational goods. This
was partly due to the fact that the means of mass communication
were expensive, cumbersome and thus relatively centralized. In
this configuration, most people were relegated to the role of
consumers, or, if they lacked purchasing power, not even that.

This
is changing. The Internet is giving ever greater numbers of people
access to efficient means of mass communication and p2p protocols
such as Bittorrent are making the distribution of material highly
efficient. For some reason to be further examined, more and more
material is becoming freely available within this new information
environment. As an effect, the current structure of the culture
industries, in Adorno's sense,[1] is being undermined, and with it,
deeply-entrenched notions of intellectual property. This is happening
despite well-orchestrated campaigns by major industries to prevent
this shift. The campaigns include measures raging from the seemingly
endless expansion of intellectual property regulations across the
globe, to new technologies aimed at maintaining informational scarcity
(digital rights management (DRM) systems), to mass persecution of
average citizens who engage in standard practices on p2p networks.

As a consequence, we are in the midst of a pitched battle. One side we
have organized industries, with their well-honed machines of political
lobbying and armies of highly-paid lawyers and technologists, on the
other side. Strangely enough, on the other side, we do not have any
powerful interests or well-organized commercial players. Rather we
have a rag-tag group of people and small groups, including programmers
who develop open source tools to efficiently distribute digital
files; administrators running infrastructural nodes for p2p networks
out of their small ISPs (Internet Service Providers) or using cheap
hosted locations; shadowy, closed "release groups" who specialize in
circumventing any kind of copy-protection and making works available
within their own circles often before it they are available to the
public; and, finally, millions of ordinary computer users who prefer
to get their goods from the p2p networks where they are freely
available (not just free of charge, but also without DRM) and where
they can, if they wish to, release their own material just as easily.

J.D. Suss writes:

Underdog Reaction to Attacks on America
Jonathan D. Suss

Underdogs across America, those less enamored of the conventional American dream, must surely have seen the September 11 attacks differently than those tough-talking, flag-waving patriots popularly portrayed in the media. Not that the outrage was any less. But to underdogs the events and reactions since that day have conveyed deeper meanings.

To underdogs, the red, white and blue now symbolize a National Security State. Thus, the patriotic fervor stirred up by the attacks represents a misguided emotionalism built upon myths of American liberty and democracy – myths that are perhaps more telling of an earlier age. For America has long since lost its innocence. And in a complacency born of plenty, the character of the nation has been steadily eroding into self-indulgence. Self-righteous beliefs in our superior way of life, our super-power government, and our supposed role as world guardian of democracy, persist in the face of an irresponsible form of freedom at home, fueled by the trance-like influence of a corporate military-industrial/info-entertainment complex. And so patriotic sloganeering that seeks to resurrect past glories falls on increasingly dubious ears. Most of it sounds to me like ignorance parading in its own delusion. Monied interests now rule here in a bureaucratic government headed up mostly by the same weak-of-character, carbon-copy elitists that can now be found everywhere – in business, the media, the academy, science and the arts.

I am less a citizen of the United States of America than I am an inhabitant of the North American continent Native Americans call Turtle Island. The outrage of the attacks is found in the violence it has done to our sense of this place as our collective home. It upsets the cultural ecology of our belongingness in this space, a space not welcome to yet more invaders. All oppressed people have experienced this invasion displacement. For example, the Native Americans, Palestinians, Zulu, Vietnamese, Jews, Roma – all must have felt this frustrated rage at being deprived of the integrity of place. Americans, just now experiencing this same disabling sense of helplessness, act as if they are the first to ever suffer such an indignity, or they project an overly indignant air that such a calamity should befall a people of such privilege. It sickens one to witness the misplaced, over-inflated pride that feeds public discourse on TV talk shows, the Internet, and in call-in radio programs. One only hopes that having now been bruised, the wakened U.S. giant might start empathizing more with the real world. But, for now, underdogs can only howl.