Re: nettime history lesson
Keith Hart wrote: I have left out the camouflage provided by Armageddon in the Middle East for the economic upheavals unleashed by the current devaluation of the dollar in the face of a cumulative transfer of economic power from West to East. Keith this is all tremendously clear and useful (few things in there I knew nothing about!) and particularly some expansion on this last point would be great. On the one hand, we know that the capitalist labor force has practically doubled since 1989 (well, your text makes it clear that's an exaggeration, since part of the former communist bloc was already working for the west, but still it's an enormous new labor pool), we know that there's tons of fixed capital investment going on to make that labor productive and what this has always meant in the past is that the regions where development takes place soon outstrip or at least rival with their developers. But then the developers (the US in particular) always have ways of fighting back too, like the monetary turn in the early 80s was a way of fighting back at the rise of Europe and Japan. If I understand, one way to read the devaluation is as a way to just cut off some US debt by making dollar holdings functionally smaller. But what does that really mean? I read in the New Left Review an article by a guy named R. Taggart Murphy called East Asia's Dollars. He says this: There is no secret about the identity of the biggest dollar holders. They are the central banks and other Financial institutions of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates. If the dollar is going to crash, one or more of these places is going to have to change its stance towards the American currency. They display such a seemingly reflexive commitment to accumulating and retaining dollars that some commentators have described the current global financial order as ???Bretton Woods II??a continuation by other means of the dollar-centred international order that prevailed in the postwar decades. The label does not itself explain why these states behave as they do. But it suggests that, for whatever reason, they have motives other than maximizing returns on their foreign-currency holdings; that they have a vested interest in the continuation of a US-led ???nancial system. (1) What he also says (and I found this really interesting) is that the biggest dollar-holder by far and away, when you factor in not just the central bank but also the corps and private banks, is still Japan - and he thinks the Japanese oligarchy has a vested interest in the system and will basically continue to hold it up. In fact one of the guys in Multitudes - a Japanese Althusserian named Yoshiko Ichida - described this once in an article as the Imperial monetary circuit, (2) which I think was one of the best uses made of the notion of Empire as a network, by our gang anyway. The same could be said for the Saudis and the other Gulf states, though the Saudis are surely the most exposed to internal turmoil. So how do you see the tensions playing out if the monetary system actually holds? I think it will... for quite a while anyway It may be that the American public needs educating about its own passive role in generating this nightmare. I think they do (or we do!) and I also liked Kimberley de Vries' idea that we oughtta actually do something with all the discussion on the subject. But what? An open letter to the Americans on the eve of their (our) next godawful election? I lay at bed last night (Ok, I'm a little feverish) thinking about the chances of a nettime-organized bot-net revolution massively spamming the US population with the most finely tuned and clearly worded explanation ever dreamable of why the whole world-system is sick and what can be done about it Tactical economics anyone? best, Brian 1. It's NLR 40, July Aug 2006 and I can send it to anybody who wants. 2. http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Circuit-monetaire-imperial-ou.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Iraq: Ways Backward Digest
Michael Goldhaber wrote: I agree with most of what Brian wrote, except for his urging us to read a two-year-supply of books. Michael, you will have noticed that I always take a keen interest in your writing, so please don't take the following as any sign of disrespect or animosity. It is true that few people want to sit around reading for 2 years, and I would agree with you that this might be entirely useless if it were to mean doing only that, and not at the same time engaging with the world. However, what I myself realized, just over 2 years ago as the calendar would have it - in that ignominious year of 2004 - is that the world lives under an Empire, that said Empire is American (and not some volatilized network as many hoped it was becoming), and that this Imperial condition remained bizarrely unknown in the very place from where it emanates, which also happens to be the place I was born. It seems to me that everyone who works with politics of any sort, and especially those born in the USA, now has some kind of responsibility to understand the structure of power in the emerging global society. To achieve even the rudiments of an understanding requires a certain familiarity with history both domestic and global, because today's situations always spring from yesterday's. Yet getting there is difficult. It takes work, it takes reading and analysis, and it also takes public debate, where the point is not to be right but to learn something. If not, who will know? The case of Saudi Arabia which you mention is a case in point. What is going on there? To a large degree, neither you nor I know. However, I can assure you that our current ruling oligarchy has many ideas about it. And not just because Bush receives his Arabian peers for Johnny Walkers at the ranch (as, of course, he used to receive the Bin Ladens). The reason why is that the entire Arabian peninsula, having acquired a great deal of capital subsequent to 1973, is now deeply integrated to the US economic circuit. Its ultramodern cities bloomed from the sand, the way Europe and Japan's cities were reborn from the ashes of war, because of this integration. However, in the case of Saudi, there were not generations upon generations of engineers lying around just waiting for a job. Instead, American and European companies built those cities, in exchange for the currency that national populations of the oil-guzzling regions surrendered to the ruling classes of the Arabian peninsula (this being, of course, a little less than one might think, since the same populations surrendered more currency to their local predatory oil-refining corporations - but let's get back to that some other day). What I am saying is that Western capital under American hegemony literally built the present-day ruling class of the Arabian peninsula. However, the US is as far from controlling the Saudi Arabian leadership as the latter are from controlling their own people. If I understand correctly, this is because of the tremendous gap in terms of income and power between the royalist Saudi elites and the masses of the population. To this must be added the desire for autonomy expressed by certain fractions of the elite, who apparently are not all in total thrall to Western capital. Religion, of course, is the currency of dissent under these latitudes. Which means that the Saudi royals, while dependent on the US, must play a double game, pragmatically toeing the line of the Western consensus while rhetorically espousing some kind Islamic purity, for fear, if not, of losing control of their own people (Pakistan being the other key nation which is in a very similar position). Given that radical Wahhabism originates in Saudi (or more precisely, lies at the very origin of the country), given that the Saudis sheltered radical members of Muslim Brotherhood in the early days after repression began in Egypt and now broadly identify with Egyptian Salafism, and given of course that Bin Laden himself is a Saudi, there is clearly a lot of deep anti-American sentiment in Saudi Arabia. For this reason, after 9/11 the pressure on the US to withdraw the bases that they installed in the Holy Land of the Muslim faith was tremendous: it was considered doubtful whether the Saudi regime could survive if the bases remained. And the survival of the Saudi regime is now essential to US global strategy. But then again, there was a new place nearby to put military bases, in addition to Qatar (and of course, in addition to all the bases installed around Afghanistan in the lead-up to the invasion of that country). And this new place was Iraq, where the US confidently expected to be staying for quite a while, where indeed it expected to finally build up a really secure American presence in the coveted Middle East. Yet given what has become of that expectation, this does not appear to mean the Middle Eastern problem is solved, or that the
Re: nettime Iraq: The Way Forward
The notion of a teachable moment is fundamental. I take it to mean, a moment when every thoughtful and responsible American, in whatever medium, arena, theater, conversation or public or private function they occupy or can open up, should seize the occasion of widespread uncertainty, failed policy and political transition and use it to state facts, raise questions and outline alternatives that can help shift the way people think about the role of the US in the world. One can see from the way that Michael Goldhaber has written his text that it is meant to be clear, within practically anyone's reading capacities, unambiguous, useful, memorable. I like that. As the Iraqi quagmire swallows up the last bit of Bush's credibility along with many mistaken American certainties, there is a chance to step into the gap, to change the US world view. Benjamin Geer's response adds another dimension. From an American perspective, it is what you might call global media radicalism. Al Jazeera has for years been painted as America's enemy, a dark, ignorant, gesticulating fountain of lies. Ben portrays it as a kind of open door to the disjunctive realities of the 21st century. Qatar has colonized Britain. This, as most people on nettime realize, is possible because world financial flows, concentrating around sources of petrol, have utterly transformed the Arabian peninsula in a period of only 35 years (since 1973). But the dangerous gap between this aristocratic and capitalistic node of the world network in Arabia, and the regional audience it addresses, mired in economic stagnation and more-or-less dictatorial regimes, is also one of those complex realities that the citizens of the planet are trying to deal with. This is what having Al Jazeera in your living room could make apparent. There is an irony in the fact that despite the basic stuff of which deserts are made, it is the temperate USA which seems to have its head in the sand. Beyond the clearly stated and wholly essential verities of the teachable moment, there is a whole universe of contradictions, cultural divides and recalcitrant difficulties of coexistence that forms the very medium of thought and exchange between intelligent human beings in the present. Yet precisely this is absent from public life in the USA. One will answer, yes, but in what national arena or media system is it present? Outside specific diplomatic and business circles, European cosmopolitanism and multilingualism is largely limited to the awareness of one's neighbors on a stretch of land no larger than the continental US. But Europe is not the hegemonic power that has supplied the language, culture, toolkits, economic drive and military punch that together constitute what we call globalization. American cosmopolitanism would need to far exceed Europe's, and take in the very scope of an empire which it cannot hold together in any case, but whose breakup will only be more violent if levels of ignorance in the US remain what they are today. Stretching for a decade or a generation beyond the teachable moment there is the vast, multitudinous project of trying to open up the eyes and ears and heads of our intelligent and capable but strangely reserved and sometimes willfully obtuse friends (or even countrymen) in the endless golf course, donut stop and strip mall that extends between the frontiers of Mexico and Canada. best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Michael Malone : Regulating Destruction
Patrice Riemens wrote:
The result was Sarbanes-Oxley, Regulation FD ('Fair Disclosure', aka
'Fear and Doubt' - PR), and stock option valuation (by the IRS -PR)- three
great lessons in the law of unintended consequences. Let's do our own
accounting: Thanks to this troika, fewer companies are going public; economic
power is being concentrated in the hands of fewer companies; competition is
reduced; new wealth is less widely distributed; the rich are getting richer;
fewer talented people want to join entrepreneurial ventures; and corporate
boards are getting stupider and more paranoid (- a reference to the recent HP
bandobust -PR). And, please note, one of the crucial triggers for economic
booms - a burts that of young tech companiy IPOs - has now largely evaporated.
Just curious, but is this really what federal regulators, Congress and
shareholder rights activists had in mind?
The full article can be found here:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116667005208856400-lMyQjAxMDE2NjI2MTYyNzEwWj.html
This is dodgy stuff, Patrice. Mainly just anti-regulatory fulminations,
at a pretty low level of interest as far as I can tell. First of all,
there are less IPOs because there is less silly money out there: the
same kinds of middle-class investors who made the dotcom bubble and then
lost their savings when it burst are now in the process of losing their
shirts in the bursting of the housing bubble. Second of all, after a
period of intense speculation and then a big shake out and collapse of
values, a period of corporate consolidation and attempts to re-establish
oligopoly positions is just about as ordinary as capitalism itself.
Felix's use of the word cartel heads in exactly this direction. But
it's also true that before the bubble, being bought out by a larger
company was simply the natural destiny of start-ups - and now we are
back to that part of the cycle. Elsewhere in the article, the author
laments the fact that all the IPO action is now happening in Hong Kong.
But the appearance of hot money in Asia right now is also quite
predictable, especially in China, whose fantastic industrial growth has
produced a veritable overflow of capital, an excess of the kind which is
actually dangerous for the stability of the banking sector. So why does
Michael Malone get so worked up? Answer: he's nostalgic for the
champagne days in Silicon Valley, and above all, he's just plain full of
shit and wants to sell a little of it to the WSJ. Or so it appears from
my perspective.
The question raised by Mark Stahlman, as to whether all this signifies a
turn away from financialization and the beginning of a new industrial
cycle of the kind described by Carlota Perez, is pretty uncertain imho.
Youtube is not exactly an industry. It's a device for capturing and
channeling the attention of people living on credit (as pretty much all
of the Americans do - average indebtedness is now up to something like
110% of earnings). The Triad countries - Europe, North America, Japan -
are all deeply mired in the process of managing financial capital, and
of those three ultrarich regions, only Japan has really managed to make
its financial capital materially productive. By investing that part of
it which does not feed the US appetite for credit into Chinese and South
East Asian industrial production.
best, Brian
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nettime review of THE MAGHREB CONNECTION
Below is the exhibition review of The Maghreb Connection, which I wrote at the request of eipcp's Transform project: http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1166295344 The ambition of Transform is to explore how mainstream institutions can be adapted to support, extend and distribute some of the breakthroughs of processual and politically oriented art. To that extent, it's natural they were interested in this project. Happy holidays to those who celebrate, BH *** THE MAGHREB CONNECTION: Movements of Life Across North Africa Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, December 11, 2006 - January 13, 2007 For further info and traveling schedule: www.geobodies.org/02_curatorial_projects/2006_maghreb_connection To the left of the factory space is an animated cartoon video by the Cairene artist Hala Elkoussy and her collaborators, From Rome to Rome, sketching out the unlucky travelogue of an Egyptian who has become fascinated with life in Italy, all because of the tall tales and concrete material wealth of the people in a delta village nicknamed Roma. On the right is a wall-sized black-and-yellow map of the militarized Strait of Gibraltar, researched and designed by the Spanish activist group Hackitectura (whose larger network, including Helena Maleno and Nicolas Sguiglia Pincolini who both came to speak, has just released a new book, Fadaiat: Libertad de movimiento, libertad de conocimiento). Against the back wall one sees a projected sequence from Agadez Chronicles by Ursula Biemann, showing a migrant transit hub in the Saharan state of Niger. Closer to us, on a small monitor, are views from her descent through the uranium mines of Arlit, also in Niger. To the right of that are two equal-sized and somewhat more imposing screens, one with ghostly informational images from surveillance drones gliding over the Sahara, the other featuring an interview with a Tuareg man named Adawa, who runs clandestine transportation lines from Arlit to Algeria and Libya. The place where we encounter all these images is the Townhouse Gallery, smack in the middle of Cairo. Take a few steps from the entryway, then sit down to watch the tightly articulated video-essay by the young Swiss-American Charles Heller, presented next to the map by Hackitectura. Entitled Crossroads at the Edge of Worlds: Sub-Saharan Transit Migration in Morocco, it will embark you on a journey from the city of Tangier and the forest camp of Bel Younnech above Ceuta, through Oujda on the Algerian frontier and all the way down to coastal Laayoune, where migrants leave for the far-off Canary Islands in boats they must in some cases build with their own hands. The exhibition marks the latest stage in Ursula Biemann's collaborative quest to invent a visual geography, deeply informed by social science and at grips with actuality, but using the tools of art and presented on the museum circuit. With this project where she is both participant and curator, an important step has been taken toward the realization of what is undoubtedly a widespread desire, that of making such collaborations fully cross-cultural. The process of research unfolded over the course of two years, not as a tightly concerted effort but rather among a loose network whose exchanges were sparked by a number of meetings. In addition to the show there is a book, also entitled The Maghreb Connection, which can be read in two directions, beginning at either cover, since it is in both English and Arabic. The project as a whole is informed by the studies of a Algerian geographer in exile, Ali Bensaad, and a Franco-Moroccan sociologist, Mehdi Alioua, both of whom contributed excellent essays, along with the urban anthropologist Michel Agier, the architect Keller Easterling, the no-border activist Florian Schneider and a group of students from the School of Fine Arts in Geneva. While media attention is devoted almost exclusively to the arrival of migrants on Europe's heavily guarded southern shores, the exhibition and book explore the risky crossing of the Sahara, as well as the conditions of temporary or permanent residence for sub-Saharan migrants in the Maghreb countries of North Africa. In addition to the works I've already mentioned, the show includes a series of allegorical photographs by the Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, entitled Sleepers, and a video on the life and work of Chinese women selling clothes in the poorer neighborhoods of Cairo, by the Egyptian artist Doa Aly. The latter work, entitled Chinese Sweet, Chinese Pretty, brings something particular to the audience in Cairo: a gaze on immigration in their own country, and a look at the city from the radically different perspective of Chinese peasant farmers who find a way to improve their life back home by means of a temporary stay in Egypt. The primary aim of the show is to approach the self-understanding of those who go looking for their lives, particularly the modern-day adventurers
nettime Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power
[Hello everyone, here is an interview that brings out the major stakes of the Continental Drift Seminar happening in New York this weekend. Details of the schedule and and an address for the live stream, as well as access to all the text mentioned here, can be found at http://www.16beavergroup.org/drift best to all, BH] Continental Drift II: Articulating the Cracks in the Worlds of Power 16 Beaver Group talking with Brian Holmes 16 Beaver: When we started thinking about doing something like a seminar together, a few ideas emerged: A. We didn't want it to be a seminar in the ordinary sense, nor a workshop, nor a conference, nor a convergence, nor even a model for others. B. We wanted to organize it with the minimum amount of money and without relying on any outside organizations, grants, or institutions. C. We wanted it to be the beginning of a collaboration, between 16beaver and Tangent University and Brian Holmes and other colleagues ... to explore a new way of working together and sharing our know-what and know-how. D. We wanted to bring people together who have been associated with our respective efforts to engage over a longer term in actually influencing one another. E. To combine together, even more than our past collective efforts, our research interests and our activities, to try and make sense of what is taking place around us in the name of ?politics? or ?economic rationality? or ?development,? and to find within our own practices the spaces and modes which might pose the greatest challenges and problems to ?business as usual.? F. To not be afraid to ask the most ambitious of questions, or to fail entirely. Having arrived at year 2, we have a much larger number of collaborators and individuals who will be contributing to our ongoing inquiries. So these questions to you, Brian, are not meant in any way to reduce the voice of these inquiries to one spokesperson. They are instead meant to come back to some of the points of departure we shared and to explore both the theoretical concerns as well as the organizational ones. In relation to the ideas we were exploring in the first year, what would you outline as the main theses? Brian Holmes: Well, of course there are different levels, analytic and metaphorical, poetic and political, all entangled in the title, Continental Drift. And since we've tended in our work together to be strict, sociological and painstakingly historical, with an obsessive attention to economics, infrastructure and ideology, I'd like to turn that all upside down for a change and begin with the poetics. On the one hand, the title evokes geology, plate tectonics, the geohistorical splitting of great landmasses, the telluric shifts that rip continents apart, the incredibly powerful and violent energies coursing through the world today. It's a name for immensity. On the other hand, it immediately recalls something intimate and experimental, the situationist practice of drifting, of losing yourself, of abandoning conventional purposes and rationalized coordinates to seek out radically different orientations in experience, but on an unexpected planetary scale - as though you could wander across entire regions, spanning the gaps between worlds, or spiraling weightlessly through civilizations. So it's a name for intimacy in immensity. At the same time, without any possible escape, the overblown image of continental drift tends to deflate into its opposite, something familiar or downright banal: the basic condition of global unification by technology and money, where it's possible for privileged individuals to move freely but ignorantly about the earth, like taking the train across town for a buck and a quarter. So if you weave all those sensations together, the whole thing speaks of fault-lines in an overwhelming global unity, and of the elusive quest for a direct experience of a split reality. As though you could embrace the movement of a world that falls apart, as though you could embody the splintering cracks, the bifurcations, the shattering, and on the far side, begin understanding what it will be like to have to pick up the pieces 16B: OK, so what about the economy, the sociology, that obsessively analytic dimension? BH: What we managed to explore last year was above all a single thesis, drawn from the history of political economy: Karl Polanyi's notion of the double movement. This refers to the fundamental paradox of capitalism, which by commodifying everything, by bringing every aspect of human experience under the rules of profit and reinvestment, at the same time provokes a defensive reaction of breakup, of escape, whether through withdrawal and autarky, warlike aggression, or the search for a better alternative. Polanyi, whose major work is called The Great Transformation, is really an ecological thinker. He shows how the notion of the self-regulating market, which is supposed to assign
nettime Invisible States: Europe in the Age of Capital Failure
[I would like to publish on nettime this rather long essay, which was commissioned for Capital (It Fails Us Now) - not only a song by the Gang of Four, but also an exhibition held in Oslo at the end of last year and in Tallinn at the very beginnning of this one. The reason for publishing this text on nettime is simply to ensure the free circulation of cultural content, irrespective of its value (well done, poorly done, not done at all, as Robert Filliou used to say). The text has been printed, along with many other documents from the exhibition, by Simon Sheik, Katya Sander and B_Books, Berlin. Get your copy from them. I haven't yet seen the results but I'm sure it's a good thing. The essay attempts to diagnose the vicissitudes of the welfare state, particularly in northern Europe, over the last 50 years. It is based on my research and on interviews which I conducted in Norway and Estonia, making use of the funds of the soon-to-be-defunct institution NIFCA (a relic of the Cold War, you will no longer need to know what the letters stand for). There is some solid analysis in here. I believe this is a lucid and precise look at the decay of the common over that period of time. The recent Swedish elections prove the point. Continued belief in this kind of state would be idiotic - if there weren't so much to lose by abandoning it all together. For better and for worse, the invisible welfare state is the paradox of our time. We will all remain hamstrung until we collectively go beyond it. best, BH] *** Invisible States Europe in the Age of Capital Failure Introduction After 9/11 and its worldwide consequences, after the travesty of Iraq?s supposed weapons of mass destruction, after the collapse of the project for an EU Constitution, after the banlieue riots in France and all they reveal about neocolonial racism on the Old Continent, it might be easier to agree that capital is really failing us, right now. But the most important question is: who are ?we?? And how exactly do we experience the very real breakdowns of that immense and highly abstracted articulation of society which goes under the name of capital? How to map out that articulation, as it changes over time to reach a point of what now appears as permanent crisis? How to locate and name the living flesh of capital failure? The exhibition Capital (It Fails Us Now) has its locus in two national states on the northern edges of Europe: Norway, which has declined to be a formal member of the European Union, and Estonia, which is among the new members in the former East. In both these countries (but for very different reasons) the form of the state as a democratic instance and an economic project is intensely at issue. In what follows I will not give any account of the exhibition itself, but rather focus on the changing forms of the capitalist state, within a European context that is structured not only by its shaky supranational architecture, but also by far-ranging transformations of the world economy. The point is not to expect salvation or damnation from what Engels famously referred to as ?the ideal collective capitalist.? [1] Instead, the point is to create a framework for understanding the transformations of an institutional and legal mix (the state) that attempts to mediate, on the one hand, between the inhabitants of a national territory and the individual capitalist enterprises that organize their productivity; and on the other, between this bounded national territory and the relatively anarchic transnational space into which it is inserted by the constant flux of trade, investment, interstate alliances and relations of force. Within the world-system composed by the capitalist democracies of the post-WWII era, the state has in effect been called upon to act a kind of double filter, articulating the specific relations between its various classes of inhabitants, as well as their general relations with the outside world. In this respect, the state is - or more precisely, has attempted to be - the ?integral of power formations,? to borrow the phrase with which Felix Guattari once described capital. [2] The democratic state, as a crossroads of economic power and popular representation, has at its best been something like the means which society has given itself to make capital visible, to place its operations on the negotiating table. One need not be surprised, then, to find a complex and problematizing exhibition of visual art exploring precisely the ways in which this project of visibility now appears to fail. Indeed, the postwar democratic state has claimed to be an integrally public and fully transparent articulation between all the conflicting forces at play in the human universe, including not only the powers of capital and its associated imperatives of military production and warfare, but also the expressed needs and desires of populations outside any economic logic or will to domination. It is precisely the existence of this claim, or
nettime YES MEN strike again
New! Get the latest news on RENE OSWIN with Google Alerts: http://news.google.com/news?hl=enned=usie=UTF-8q=rene+oswinbtnG=Search+News Rene Oswin, fictive HUD representative, dons the mask to speak the truth in New Orleans. Read all about it in dozens of newspapers. Guy Fawkes' Day coming soon to a parliament near you # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Re: Peace-For-War / Grid Fork / Islamic perspective
Hello Alex, Felix, Ed, Benjamin, everyone, I'm intrigued to the fullest by the responses to the paper I posted (why else does one write?), and by the chance to dig deeper into what's become a much more interesting subject. Alex has my three cheers for bringing the regulation school ideas into our amateur/activist/pop-theory debates. That body of work, along with a book called The Second Industrial Divide, is the background to a lot of the Italian autonomist theorizing that has been so great for finally managing to actually include us (the possible agency of each of us). The hope would be to go further, and to create concepts that really fit the present. In my opinion, the Muslim world perspective that Benjamin brings would make all the difference in that last respect. I'm really glad about this discussion and would like to continue it in a sustained way. People in English-speaking lands may be unfamiliar with the regulation school, though there was a good intro in David Harvey's book, The Condition of Postmodernity, chapter 7. I'm gonna give my version of what Alex already said about it. The regulationists treat technological changes in the mode of production as a force of rupture in history, then analyze how a new social form emerges from the interactions between organizational innovations on the one hand (the regime of accumulation), and governmental or societal intervention on the other (the mode of regulation). After the steam-based industrial revolution, it's generally thought that a first break occured in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the introduction of a new technological paradigm (electric power and internal combustion engines), leading to a new regime of accumulation (assembly-line mass production under the organizational form of the vertically integrated, multi-divisional corporation). In response to the crises of WWI, the Russian Revolution and 1929, the period of the 1930s then becomes a laboratory for the regulation of the new regime; and the model of the welfare state finally emerges from Roosevelt's programs, then later from Beveridge in the UK and related developments around Europe. All this becomes fascinating to the extent that yet another new technological paradigm (based on transistors, computing, communications) began coming together in the 1970s, a third industrial revolution that was gradually taken up and developed as an answer to the persistent crisis and stagnation of the mass production-national corporation-welfare state system. So you get what Castells calls informationalism as a new mode of production, soon matched by the emergence of the transnational network firm, organizing just-in-time customized manufacturing around the world. This amounts to a new regime of accumulation. Notice that it goes along with globalization and financialization, bringing into the equation a whole new problem of international relations that the regulationists don't deal with very well, to my knowledge. Anyway, Alex is saying (and I totally agree) that this new regime of accumulation, driven ahead by computerization and a host of associated technological changes, comes up against a socioeconomic crisis in the late 1990s, when the initial attempt to regulate it by basically doing nothing (laissez-faire) leads to market failures, social crises, wars and the abysmal state of the present. Alex does take on the international dimension, and he writes: a regulation crisis occurs when the laissez-faire responses to a new technological paradigm show all its socioeconomic limits (not enough effective demand, no social legitimacy) and leads to geopolitical instability (open power rivalry with a concurrent crisis in world hegemony). Regulation crises are... those of the interwar period and the early 21st century. Again, my contention is that ideology matters most in regulation crises, when rival institutional setups are proposed and fiercely fought over. The basic program that emerges from any regulationist-type analysis is this: understand the social problems of the new regime of accumulation, then propose new institutions. That's what the people at the journals Futur Anterieur and then Multitudes have been talking about in a more activist way for the last 15 years (not surprising, the regulation school is mainly French). I dunno if there's been such a focused discussion in Italy, or anywhere else. And maybe the problem is, the autonomist crowd (and what Alex calls the heretical left) only really got moving again in the late 90s during the bubble economy, so we somewhat simplified the picture of the new accumuation regime (network utopianism) and we idealized the subjects who could bring it into crisis (hackers, zapatistas, alterglobalizers, etc.). With the result that we're only just now starting to face the nitty-gritty. The text on Peace-for-War tried to look directly at the US neoconservative answer to the turn-of-the century crises, and to ask, counter-intuitively, whether that
Re: nettime Peace-for-War
Ed Philips wrote:
Arrighi's long twentieth century thesis which is a kind of
rethinking of Marx'x MCM formula has some fitness as well.
To quote Arrighi, financialization (the capacity of finance
capital 'to take over and dominate, for a while at least,
all the activities of the business world') has been the
result of a recurrent overaccumulation of capital ('the
accumulation of capital on a scale beyond the normal
channels for investment'.)
Hi Ed, greetings, thanks for your comments and observations.
Actually, some more would be useful.
I'd be very interested in strong critiques of Bichler
Nitzan, either of what they claim to add to Marxism (the
notion of differential accumulation), of their empirical
findings (the various graphs) or finally, of their
conclusions (particularly about the influence of a specific
corporate lobby as a factor in US foreign policy).
I'm definitely an amateur at this, but I've read a fair bit
of Harvey, Arrighi, world-systems theory generally, the New
Left Review authors, etc. Very enlightening stuff. What I
always missed, though, were political applications of
notions as abstract as overaccumulation and
financialization. Who are the actors of such processes,
where and when and why do their decisions matter?
Even the French regulation school, though they pay closer
attention to the relations between technological change,
organizational innovations, and social, political or even
cultural norms, still tend mainly to describe shifts between
broad productive paradigms. Well, pretty much everyone I
know in Europe, on an activist level, tried to work in order
to influence what seemed to be a new productive paradigm,
coming in the wake of industrial mass production.
Post-fordism, we called it, using the regulation-school
term. We thought the contradictions of post-Fordism offered
an opening for the transformation of society (ways of
working, measures of value, unemployment policies, urban
ecologies, north-south relations, many things). However, a
sudden political turnabout, with economic and military
consequences far more dramatic than any broad paradigm could
account for, seems to have made much of that work obsolete.
Nobody wants to hear about our social utopias anymore.
This change is particularly acute with respect to the USA,
the hegemon after all, whose transformations affect
everyone. It's abundantly clear that a specific
constellation of actors (ideological, economic, military,
and financial in a markedly statist way) has been at the
helm since Bush came in, or more precisely, since September
11. The differences from the Clinton years (and from the
expansive, internationalizing economy of those years) are
very tangible, not only politically but economically too. In
terms of differential accumulation, I looked at the top 20
profit-makers on the Fortune 500 list of American corps as
published in 2000 and 2006. The difference is striking,
check it out in the table below. The automakers (Ford, GM,
whose sales would be a sign of a growth economy), the telcos
of the 90s boom (SBC, Lucent, Bell Atlantic) and a merger
specialist (Morgan Stanley) all fall out of the top 20
profit-makers, while two oil companies appear from far below
(Chevron and ConocoPhilips), to occupy very high positions.
There is also a reshuffling of rank among financial groups,
which I am not able to read due to insufficient knowledge of
the differences between them. What's amazing, though, is the
increase in absolute profit among the highest rollers, and
particularly at the top six or seven positions, which almost
double in the amount of profit being taken (or more than
triple, in the case of the 2006 leader Exxon, compared to
the former leader in 2000, the financial/industrial corp
General Electric).
What ever happened to the new economy of high-tech
innovation, semiotic products and immaterial labor? Why is
this old one so vastly much more profitable? Well, I
summed up Bichler and Nitzan's explanations in my text.
Clearly, the process of financialization is not over, and
nor is the associated informational mode of production; but
their objects and orientations have changed in a dramatic
way. In my opinion, neither the 90s tech boom, nor the
current war economy, can be accounted mere blips in
history. They have both been too damn important in my life!
In any case, if you want to invest right now, try the oil
companies, or the major arms dealers (I have put together
some stats on them in the second table). But I'm sure you
would be far too disgusted to invest in any of this shit.
There seems to be a difference in the way the groups of
steersmen operate, both on the diplomatic and economic
levels. If you then read, say, Super Imperialism by Michael
Hudson, you begin to get a grasp of the methods used by the
statist, military-oriented group and how they have worked
over the years since WWII. Their propensity to borrow and
Re: nettime Re: rejoinder: is a radical project identity achievable?
[Post from Benjamin Geer, [EMAIL PROTECTED], addressed 2 days ago to me and nettime, never made it on nettime. -BH] On 01/08/06, Brian Holmes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What kind of culture, what kind of shared horizon can help us get there? [...] A political culture that can resolve serious differences between dissenting groups, and can draw plans for using and governing the productive forces that make and shake the earthscape [...] The exact science of our unbound dreams is what governments should be afraid of. Brian, I sympathise immensely with your motivation for asking these questions, but I think this quest for a universal progressive political culture is Quixotic and perhaps dangerous, despite the best of intentions. In 2002 I fell under the spell of a hypothesis: that some of the principles of what I saw as the political culture of free software -- open participation, public ownership of knowledge, strong reliance on consensus -- could be applied to other kinds of production -- to industry, to agriculture -- and could be used to build political systems capable of organising human life on a large scale. I was encouraged to find similar principles at work in some European activist groups and workers' collectives. I was disappointed to find that many activist groups, however, were organised along the opaque, authoritarian lines of traditional political parties, and speculated that if European social movements could be persuaded instead to put these principles (described at http://www.open-organizations.org) into practice, they would not only do their work as activists better, they would also embody a real alternative to the failed models of parliamentary democracy and of the political party, an alternative that might thus appeal to the broader disillusioned European public. Indeed, I wondered, could these principles become part of a political culture capable of working on a global level, a new universalist dream to replace the failed dream of communism, in short the Holy Grail evoked by your questions above? I knew enough about ethnocentrism to have strong reservations about anything resembling yet another Enlightenment project intended to bring a universal political culture to the world's benighted masses. I wondered: What are the necessary links between one's political culture and the rest of the culture that one lives in? How can one choose between the competing claims of any proposed new political culture and those of any existing culture? Who can legitimately make such choices? The Left has tended to settle such questions impatiently, without much reflection, by reference to supposedly universal principles of Marxism (once thought by many, and still by some, to be an exact science) or of the French Enlightenment, or more often, by instinct (I personally can't accept...), which amounts to the same thing. Any political culture that doesn't correspond to those principles therefore appears backward and, it is thought, should be consigned to the dustbin of history. I decided not to look any further for any sort of shared horizon until I had carefully studied a non-Western culture, in its political and other aspects, in some depth. I studied Arabic, and a year ago I began an extended period of study in the Middle East. I have learnt a great deal here and hope to learn a great deal more. I don't have answers to the questions I asked above, but I'm more convinced than ever that these are hard and important questions, not to be brushed aside in any premature rush towards an imagined universalism. I don't think politics can be separated from culture. The British House of Commons, European anarchist working groups, and the deliberations among the heads of clans in Upper Egypt all have their distinctive cultures. Perhaps you are right, Brian, that tomorrow's social movements need a new shared horizon as the basis for international cooperation. But even if that's true, let it not be a totalitarian horizon, one that attempts to cast all political life in the same mould. Let it be one that allows individuals and groups to move freely among political cultures and to mediate between them. Ben # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: nettime Peace-for-War
[Post from Ed Philips, [EMAIL PROTECTED], addressed maybe 10
days ago to me and nettime, never made it on nettime. -BH]
Brian, thanks for posting another thoughtful essay to nettime:
I want to start this response by saying that I agree with
your assessment that we are in your words lacking a common
language to describe the politico-economic global
environment in which we are swimming as both economic and
political actors.
The situation is as daunting for so-called experts in
individual fields of understanding as it is for the casual
amateur historian on the net.
I'm going to start as well by attempting to find some mutual
ground before I start pulling rugs from underneath our feet.
The last place that Karl Marx has any kind of broad respect
outside of leftist intellectuals circles is in the field of
Economics and in the history of Economic theory. Many
economists even of the most baldly neo-liberal stripe will
at least acknowledge Marx's contribution to the study of
Capital and his readings of Smith, Ricardo, et al. So we at
least have some terms form Marxian economics and from
contemporary economics that we can use.
On to your essay:
The essence of contemporary power is to provoke crisis and
to ride it out toward profit, without revealing strategies
or goals. Really. Is that so? Whose thinking or what set
of thinking leads to this summary at the start? Is it Harvey
or a climate shared by Harvey?
Harvey has tremendous problems coming to grips with
attempting to describe global capitalism and political
hegemony in the new imperialism. Hardt and Negri barely
achieve anything more than muddlement. This is less a
condemnation of them than an appraisal of just how difficult
the attempt to understand the situation is.
I'm going to dispense with introductory explanation in part
because I am no didact and also because I want to cut to
direct discussion. Harvey and Arrighi are some of the more
credible leftist political economists, and both of them
offer some analytic terms and interpretive machines that are
useful. Harvey may be too given over to exaggeration in his
descriptions of the state of civil society within Empire
coming apart at the seems, but his analysis is not without
some fitness.
Arrighi's long twentieth century thesis which is a kind of
rethinking of Marx'x MCM formula has some fitness as well.
To quote Arrighi, financialization (the capacity of finance
capital 'to take over and dominate, for a while at least,
all the activities of the business world') has been the
result of a recurrent overaccumulation of capital ('the
accumulation of capital on a scale beyond the normal
channels for investment'.) Witness the unprecedented scale
of financial capital and the current need of this capital to
invest in new spaces and new ventures. His work, with
Braudel's help is interesting for its long view. In this
long view, we are already experiencing the rise of Asian
long century and the end of US hegemony.
The endless accumulation of capital is itself
crisis-prone. It is not that the steersmen of the
Apocalypse need provoke crisis. Certainly those steersmen
who are still in the game seeking return on investment will
take advantage of such crises. They move to where they can
make money.
In addressing the tendency of corporations to merge and
attempt to benefit from consolidation and in what you have
defined as a strategy of breadth, you say:
It's associated with speculative fever, as corporations
double or triple in market share overnight.
It is hard to understand what the above sentence is
attempting to say about either financialization or
investment or production of new spaces or the exploitation
of new markets. The financial markets create liquidity that
then must be invested elsewhere, endlessly as Arrighi says
or in a never-ending cycle as Arendt said.
A depth strategy is then mentioned in which streamlining
or cost-cutting is placed together somewhat problematically
with the raising of prices. The breadth and depth strategy
of consolidation combined with streamlining and cost-cutting
combined with competitive reduction of prices is evident in
many areas of the economy.
the Oil wars:
I appreciate how you avoid the simple causality of naive
conspiracy theory even as I see it all, including Freddy
Jameson's attempts, as a poor-man's cognitive mapping.
Further skepticism may be warranted nonetheless than even
you grant about a connection between the price at the pump,
the disastrous Iraq quagmire and our proverbial steersmen.
I'd grant that a major impetus for the naive attempt to
secure Iraq was indeed probably the control of world
markets in Oil. The proverbial steersmen are probably
thinking or attempting to think in their own poor way ahead
twenty or more years. And probably not in terms of short
term profits, or in terms of short term economic stimulus.
The current revenge of the natural resources and the rise
nettime calling all lurkers
It's fascinating, funny and welcome, to read the debates arising from the efforts of that long list of people whom Tobias has named as the movers, shakers and happening-makers of nettime's assymetrical 10th birthday party. Wish I could've made it. Thought about it but it proved impossible. Sounds like it was great. For those whose careers allow them to live in small apartments, nettime is basically the world in your bedroom. It's the nightcap of delayed conversation which occasionally even gets a response, the morning after or a few days later, or sometimes, years later in the form of a mail, a telephone call and a visit. For me personally, the career means that the apartment has expanded into the hotel rooms, and, unfortunately, airplanes where I often spend the night, in between those activities of dubious merit called conferences aka the rubber chicken guru circuit (Kodwo Eshun's phrase). There or at home, I read, amongst so many other things, whoever has been courageous or shameless or unconscious enough to post something onto this list. Lately a lesser flow than in the past, but whatever. Despite the website I've developed with some friends, Nettime remains, for me, the vehicle of choice for free distribution of what I write: a way of sending it back to the cooperative flow it came out of, as well as a place for some exchanges on politics and art and technology and social movements. Free distribution of my kind of concept-crunching may contribute to the imposing feeling that was talked about in Montreal. It may also generate all kinds of more-or-less fantasmatic ideas about the careers of certain people. This is the kind of secret thought that each one of us has to deal with in their bedroom when they're alone with their inner furnishings. But since the world comes into our bedrooms, and what's more, as a conversation, this is a theme that would be worth discussing a little more openly. There are always at least 2 generations of nettime. The generation before you got on the list, and yours. But 5 years from 1996 brings us to 2001, which was not only the end of the tech-bubble but also the turning-point of world politics. So there are probably also 2 generations of nettime: those who were active during the 5-year boom, and during the optimistic phase of antiglobalization and tactical media; and those who came later (or maybe just lurked through). Through familiar patterns, those who were active during the boom years with code and language and images - and with free distribution - became names and through various kinds of insertion into various institutions, so that some now enjoy what has been called careers. Whether in software development, the new media circuit, the universities, the art circuit, or in the slipperier realm of general media punditry, often associated with technology or social movements. What this means must be relative to each one's position. Myself, I have basically gone on doing what I always did, trying with some difficulty to grasp the extreme changes and to find a language that could make sense amidst them. The career thing is really a pretty mixed bag. I admire those who are holding onto something interesting on an institutional level. About a third of the events I participate in as a panel-trotter have some connection to new media - and by and large, it's pretty disappointing I must say. Not as offensive as the old art circuits can be, but also, not as elaborate or deep. Often a waste of time - as the old art circuits often are too. You sift through such things the way you sift through email, exchanging glances or backchannel comments, looking to expand the informal networks where everything real is finally happening, at the singular level where you can plug into it. As for travel, it's literally killing me, but still it remains incredibly informative, the absolute most interesting thing, and a chance to keep in touch with people who are really doing things. For those who have a career but no job, who are more interested in writing about what they want than publishing where they could make money, travel is the only reason for having this so-called career. With a constant wonder whether it's reason enough to do it. So, that all said, what do the lurkers think? There can easily be another round of talking about the role of the moderators (a venerable nettime tradition), but more interesting to my mind is just talking with each other, about what the list is good for, and also what's happening around us. What else is there to do? Recently someone told me, iDC [the Institute for Distributed Creativity list] is actually more interesting than nettime these days. Yes, why not? I said. But isn't that a problem? they responded with some kind of quizzical anxiety. Well, I just laughed, but on reflection, it is. Because nettime is a larger and more complex group which has learned how to talk about more than just tech and the Internet. And so I miss it at those moments when iDC, or
nettime Event: Chris Gilbert's resignation
Here is a tightly argued text, qualifying an important act, by a rare category of the human species: a curator with an ethics of solidarity. - BH Chris Gilbert - statement on resigning 5/21/06 I made the decision to resign as Matrix Curator on April 28, but my struggles with the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive over the content and approach of the projects in the exhibition cycle Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtime/index.html) go back quite a few months. In particular the museum administrators -- meaning the deputy directors and senior curator collaborating, of course, with the public relations and audience development staff -- have for some time been insisting that I take the idea of solidarity, revolutionary solidarity, out of the cycle. For some months, they have said they wanted neutrality and balance whereas I have always said that instead my approach is about commitment, support, and alignment -- in brief, taking sides with and promoting revolution. I have always successfully resisted the museum's attempts to interfere with the projects (and you will see that the ideas of alignment, support, and revolutionary solidarity are written all over the Now-Time projects part 1 part 2 -- they are present in all the texts I have generated and as a consequence in almost all of the reviews). In the museum's most recent attempt to alter things, the one that precipitated my resignation, they proposed to remove the offending concept from the Now-Time Part 2 introductory text panel (a panel which had already gone to the printer). Their plan was to replace the phrase in solidarity with revolutionary Venezuela with a phrase like concerning revolutionary Venezuela -- or another phrase describing a relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity. I threatened to resign and terminate the exhibition, since, first of all, revolutionary solidarity is what I believe in -- the essential concept in the Now-Time project cycle -- but secondly it is obviously unfair to invite participants such as Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler or groups such as Catia TVe to a project that has one character (revolutionary solidarity) and then change the rules of the game on them a few weeks before the show opens (so that they become mere objects of examination or investigation). At first, my threat to resign and terminate the show availed nothing. Then on April 28, I wrote a letter stating that I was in fact resigning and my last day of work would be two weeks from that day, which was May 12, two days before the Now-Time Part 2: Revolutionary Television in Catia opening (http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtimept2/index.html). I assured them that the show could not go forward without me. In response to this decisive action -- and surely out of fear that the show which had already been published in the members magazine would not happen -- the institution restored my text panel to the way I had written it. Having won that battle, though at the price of losing my position, I decided to go forward with the show, my last one. One thing that should make evident how extreme and erratic the museum's actions were is that the very same sentence that was found offensive (a project in solidarity with the revolutionary process in contemporary Venezuela) is the exact sentence that is used for the first Now-Time Venezuela exhibition text panel that still hangs in the Matrix gallery upstairs. That show is on view for one more week as I write. The details of all this are important though, of course, its general outlines, which play out the familiar patterns of class struggle, are of greater interest. The class interests represented by the museum, which are above all the interests of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two (related) things to fear from a project like mine: (1) of course, revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the US government and the capitalist class that benefits from that government's policies, just as Cuba is a symbolic threat, just as Nicaragua was, and just as is any country that tries to set its house in order in a way that is different from the ideas of Washington and London -- which is primarily to say Washington and London's insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism. I must emphasize that the threat is only symbolic; in the eyes of the US government and the US bourgeoisie, it sets a bad and dangerous example of disobedience for other countries to follow, but of course the idea that such examples represent a military threat to the US (would that it were the case) is simply laughable; (2) the second threat, which is probably the more operational one in the museum context, is that much of the community is in favor of the Now-Time projects -- the response to the first exhibition is enormous and the interest in the second is also
Re: nettime Network, Swarm, Microstructure
Prem Chandavarkar wrote: To me, the power of Kaikini's observations lay in: 1. The transcendent can be found in what is immediately adjacent. 2. We inhabit a reality that does not exist only on one level. Reality is multi-leveled and complex, and our sense of being shifts between mundane, terrestrial and transcendent levels. All art recognised this, and perhaps this is why art has sat so comfortable next to religion over several centuries. Polanyi goes so far as to say that the more tacit the knowledge is, the more transcendent it is likely to be. 3. We tend to assume that tacit knowledge, because it cannot be verbalised, is not shareable - and is therefore less tangible and real. But the world that Kaikini (or any other gifted musician) constructs through his music, even though it is purely tacit, is tangible, shareable and real enough to have commercial value, allowing the musician to earn a living through it. While all this may seem far away from the realm of network theory, I believe it is crucial. Emergent networks build on close-grained local links, and movement between mundane connections and higher levels of being understood through collectively owned patterns. When one comes to reflexive networks, those patterns hold a sense of transcendence that binds communities. A theory of reflexive networks must include a theory of knowledge and the links between epistemic systems and social cohesion. Your text was very interesting, Prem. Particularly the above, which is exactly the point that I was trying to get at. I think that the behavior of people, and therefore the way they use networks and their specific protocols, is greatly influenced by many factors of aeshetic tastes, value orientation, cosmology and feeling of community. The affective dimension where a musician intervenes is fundamental to the kind of orientation I am thinking of. The affective dimension is, almost by definition, a realm of the proximate, the nearby, closeness. The orality/literacy distinction that you mention (Ong) is a binary that took different forms in the twentieth century. One is the distinction by the German sociologist Toennies, between community and society (or Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which is the name of the book). That distinction was subsequently taken up and reworked by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, in his Homo Aequalis books (which, interestingly enough, were written after Homo Hierarchicus, a study of the Indian caste system). Dumont observes that interpersonal relations in most societies until around the 16th-17th century in Europe were hierarchically structured - where the root hiero, meaning sacred, holy, indicates an orientation to transcendance. In Europe this gave the notion of a great chain of being in which everyone, including both animals and spirits, supposedly occupied a rightful place. What we call the symbolic are all the structures of feeling associated with this traditional notion of rightful places. However, Dumont also believed that since the Enlightenment and the French revolution, modernity issynonymous with the domination of individualism and the ascendency of equal-to-equal relations, as expressed not only in constitutional law (human rights), contractual relations, the money economy and so on, but also in the symbolic realm. The notion and the feeling of right changes. He thought that elements of a hierarchically structured society, oriented to transcendence, could persist but would be (and must be) subordinated to the order of individualism and equality. Now, my own view is that this subordination, on which the modern and modernizing projects have been founded, does not sufficiently explain our relations to each other, the earth and the stars, to put it briefly. It is too brutally simplifying, and so it makes much tacit knowledge into unconscious, unexpressed and unavowed sentiment or resentment. It does dictate the conditions of universal law that have achieved the widest distribution across the planet, but it is subject to such tremendous stresses that it has now produced yet another huge and violent outburst of the repressed hierarchical demons, in the form of racism, fundamentalism and war. Another version of the binary mentioned above has been rootedness or uprootedness, which is the kind of word that mid-twentieth century fascists would use (Dumont saw Fascism and Nazism as resistance to the universals of individualism and equality). Michael Polanyi's brother, Karl, produced a more interesting reading of this with the distinction between embeddedness and disembeddedness. Karl Polanyi's subject was the market. In his view, a larger set of social institutions was broken down by the liberal, laissez-faire notion that markets are self-regulating, i.e. that the operations of selling for a profit and buying at best price can
nettime Network, Swarm, Microstructure
Albert Hupa wrote: Let's consciously combine two meanings of a network: a map, a set of relations analyzed from ecological point of view and the kind of behaviour That is why I think of using the notion of swarm - its emergent behaviour cannot be described as unpredictable. We may find out some patterns in its behaviour and thus, learn something out of networks. Yes, I agree. The static graph of the network map is what leads, via the dynamic figure of the swarm, to a certain kind of complexity theory as a possible way to understand emergent behavior in the real world. On the one hand, the use of social network analysis tools is giving us pictures of very complicated interlinkages between individuals and groups. These pictures are quite simply fascinating, because they aggregate lots of data and allow one to glimpse patterns, or at least, the possibility of patterns, of regularities. But the maps are not enough. One needs an understanding of the quality of the links themselves, of what encourages a group to cooperate even when its membership is atomized and dispersed in space. Older sociological and anthropological studies tell a lot about how institutions organize a group (church, firm, disciplinary organization, etc) and they also tell a great deal about how family structures and status hierarchies organize people in stable localities. However, when the grip of institutions and of place-bound hierarchies declines, as is happening today, and when society largely becomes a matter of dispersions of mobile individuals in anonymous spaces - the big city; the world; the telecommunicational space - the only behavior that has really been understood very well is market behavior. We know A LOT (too much I would even say) about how price signals serve to structure the economic behavior of dispersed and mobile individuals, who are always portrayed as rationally calculating in order to maximalize their accumulation stategies (this is called methodological individualism). But is individual economic behavior the only kind that can be witnessed in the world today? Obviously not! Or let us say, rather, that within the space of very weakly determined social relations constituted by the market and price signals - the space of what the network sociologist Mark Granovetter famously called weak ties - other subsets or relational forms have started to appear. This is where the questions asked by complexity theory become so interesting and timely. What gives form and pattern to emergent behavior? How can we understand the internal consistency of self-organized groups and networks? The first answer seemed to be offered by the figure of the swarm. The word swarming describes a pattern of self-organization in real time, which seems to arise out of nowhere (or to be emergent) and yet which is recognizable, because it repeats in a more or less rhythmical way. Swarming is an initial image of self-organization. It is basically a pattern of attack, and here it's worth recalling the classic definition given by the military theorists Arquila and Ronfeldt in their book on The Zapatista 'Social Netwar' in Mexico: Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing--swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse. What the observation and description of swarming has done is to give us a temporal image of emergent activity, decisively adding a dynamic aspect which was absent from the static network maps. This is very suggestive for anyone looking to understand the kinds of behavior that seem to be associated with networks, and indeed, with a networked society. But does the dynamic image of swarming really tell us how self-organization occurs? No, I don't think so. The proof is that the American and Israeli military theorists have made dynamic models of what they see as the swarm tactic, and they now claim to use it as what they call a doctrine (see, for this, the important and sobering text by Eyal Weizman, Walking through Walls, published in the current issue of Radical Philosophy). However, I do not believe that the miliary can engage in anything approximating self-organization, where individuals spontaneously coordinate their actions with others. This is antithetical to its hierarchical structure of command. Again, the picture can be misleading, even when it is a dynamic one. What is interesting, and perhaps essential to understand, is the way individuals and small groups spontaneously coordinate their actions, without any orders. This is self-organization, this is emergent behavior. But from what ecology does it emerge - to use Albert's term? I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to
Re: nettime Markets, Hierarchies, Networks: 2 questions
Hmm, Felix, I was led off the track by your use of the word commune, which I thought was surely a typo - since in American English, a commune denotes a hippie community that has exchanged utopia for history! Cooperatives are more easily understood as attempts at doing things together, producing both objects and the forms of daily life, though of course comunes do the same thing, so your use of the word is just surprising, an interesting surprise. With that cleared up, your following remarks make perfect sense: If you look at how power works, there are real differences between these different sets. In markets, power is based on money, since the coordination takes place through price signals. In hierarchy, power is based on position, since decision-making authority is hard-coded into the structure of the organization. In a network, power is a) based on the ability to define the network protocol, and b) on the ability to contribute to the overall goal of the network on the basis of that protocol. In cooperatives, power is based on the ability to create consensus. Does a cooperative not then become a small version of a democracy? A democracy also theoretically bases its power on the ability to create consensus. But in contemporary societies, what we see is that democracies mainly create the illusion of a reasonable, Habermasian consensus, which serves to mask the economic operations of markets, hierarchies and networks Somehow, I think 'cooperation' is located on a different, normative, level. I have a hard time to think of cooperation in negative terms, and I have less problems thinking of networks as, say, being set up for exploitation. On the normative level, the key words for the four types might be: competition (for markets), command (for hierarchies), reciprocity (for networks) and consensus (for cooperatives). I'm interested in how all these forms of organization work, and I'm sure many others are, so more references to interesting articles would really be worthwile. In particular I wonder about your own interest in cooperatives. Of course that was a great theme of 70s political-economic theory: workers' self-management As for social network analysis, it would be great to hear more from Shannon Clark who surely has precise ideas about what is emerging from that field; my question was meant as a kind of pointy but gentle provocation. Concerning what you say: In the late 1990s, I was doing research on electronic money, and I met David Chaum, who was doing digicash at the time. I asked him why he had become interested in anonymous e-cash. The story he told me sounds credible, even though I don't know if it's true. He said that before the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, the CIA has done extensive analysis of the communication pattern among senior officials of the administration. They were not interested in what they were taking about. What they were really interested in were the communicative networks and in understanding who are the key nodes, connecting one part of the administration to another. These were the people they were taken out first, thus seriously crippling the ability of the government to coordinate its response to the events. He was a afraid that online such techniques would be even more powerful if we did not have anonymous communication, including financial communication. All you have to do is look at the massive number of articles and diagrams on the Al Qaeda network to be sure that this long-held interest of the CIA has been pursued up to today. Among others, the reseearchers who come to mind are the infamous Rand twins, Arquilla and Ronfeldt; Marc Sagemann, the forensic psychiatrist who also tried his hand at network mapping; and above all Karin Knorr Cetina, who has written an article called Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies, published in Theory, Culture Society, a journal to which I don't have access (if anyone can send me the pdf it would be great). Like many people using SNA representation techniques, Knorr Cetina is interested in complexity theory, which promises to tell us something about how organizations cross thresholds of change. Someone like Harald Katzmir from FAS.Research in Austria is also very interested in such theories. I am just ignorant of how far they have gotten in real predictive or even just insight-generating applications. best, BH # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
nettime Markets, Hierarchies, Networks: 2 questions
In the previous thread on Organized Networks, Felix Stalder wrote: --I always thought that networks are a basic type of organization (as are hierachies, markets, and communes, in fact, standard theory assumes that there are only these four basic forms)... Shannon Clark replied: --what standard theory are you talking about (more specifically - what field's standard theory). In terms of the study of organizational structures - or social network analysis which I am very familiar with all groups and organizations can be represented by networks... I have two questions about all this (which might also help with the discussion of Ned Rossiter's original text). Number one, how many organizational forms are there in today's standard theory? And number two, what's the difference between being in a network, and being represented as one? First let's try to figure out what's really being talked about. Felix seems to be referring to the theory of economic organization, and probably to three landmark papers: -Ronald Coase, The Nature of the Firm (1937) -Walter J. Powell, Neither Market Nor Hierarchy (1990) -Yochai Benkler, Coase's Penguin (2002) Coase was the first one to establish the distinction between markets and hierarchies, showing that in some cases, people organized their economic relations primarily according to property rights and price signals (the market), and that in others, where organization via the market was too loose and too open to problems of opportunism, they resorted to longer-term employment contracts binding them into a pyramidal structure of command and routine (hierarchy). The distinction of markets and hierarchies really became standard theory in organizational studies, especially because of the books by a guy named Oliver Williamson. In 1990 Powell then introduced the idea that in certain branches of production involving a multiplicity of formally independent actors, like publishing or movie-making, what you had was neither markets nor hierarchies, but networks, based on cooperation, reciprocity and mutual benefit. Obviously the software boom of the 90s, and the general structure of freelancing and outsourcing in the neoliberal economy around the same time, gave a big boost to the idea of the network. Then Benkler came in with his theory of commons-based peer production, exemplified by open-source coding, and proposed to add THAT to the standard theory - but without even mentioning Powell, or the concept of the network organization. Benkler's paper, and others similar to it, have been particularly interesting because they point to forms of production and exchange which are no longer specifically economic, or which extend the domain of economics to the very production of social relations (and thereby alter the whole notion of economics quite significantly). A more recent essay, by two French guys named Demil and Lecocq, puts it all together under the title Neither Market nor Hierarchy nor Network: The Emergence of Bazar Governance (where bazar is a reference to the famous Cathedral and the Bazar idea - in other words, we're still talking about Linux). So my first question is this: How justified is it to think of FOUR different forms of productive organization - market, hierarchy, network and commons? Aren't the last two just variations on each other? If the aim is to examine large-scale organizations in the real world, isn't it best to establish the distinctions and hybridizations between THREE broad sets of rules or structures of governance - based on competition, subservience and reciprocity, or on market, hierarchy and network? And finally, is network really the best possible name for the last form of structuring and governance, or does it just lead to confusion because of the connection to ICT hardware and the associated diagrams? Why not talk about market, hierarchy and cooperation? The second question springs from that last point, and has to do with social network analysis. As far as I can tell, this is a science - or branch of inquiry, anyway - that's mainly driven by innovations in graphic representation, particularly the Pajek software developed by a couple of Slovenian researchers, but also the stuff by Valdis Krebs, etc. The question is, does social network analysis have a theory? Because in effect, you can REPRESENT anything as a network, once you have defined nodes (and categories of nodes) plus connections (and quantities or qualities of connections). Those analytic representations take the form of fascinating pictures. But what kinds of theoretical synthesis come after the analysis? Does social network analysis make specific contributions to our understandings of the ways people structure and govern their relations to each other? Or does it just subsume every kind of relation under the picture of a network? curiously, Brian URLs: --Coase:
nettime A Reply to Coco Fusco
As a critic it's important to read your peers, and try to assess the pertinence of your own work in the mirror of theirs. So I was curious to read Coco Fusco's recent article on mapping [www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/ questioning_the_frame]. However, I must say that her continuous assertions of cultural authority leave me feeling highly ambivalent. On the one hand, the threads of historical memory she brings up are extremely welcome. On the other, her unwillingness to engage with current conditions and projects tends to reduce the past to a complaint: Why isn't it the present anymore? It's true that the raw fact of being older than the majority of the people in a given crowd can make you feel uncomfortably lucid. When I went to a conference on so-called locative or GPS-based media at the RIXC center in Latvia, I found most of the projects quite naive, developing a few stylistic traits of situationist psychogeography in the absence of any geopolitical critique of power relations, or any philosophical critique of instrumental rationality. In effect, a Cartesian worldview has been built into the computerized technology of graphic information systems, which are undergirded by megaprojects of military origin, or what I call imperial infrastructure. But rather than just giving a disciplinary lecture with all the answers stated in general terms, I tried to show how changing conditions had made the once-subversive traditions of psychogeography quite superficial, to the point where the aesthetic forms the artists were using seemed to render the very infrastructure of their projects invisible. And when I recently published that paper out of context in Springerin, I took the time to name all the artists and projects in question, so as to establish the precise referents of the critique [www.springerin.at/dyn/heft.php?pos=1 lang=en]. I wish Coco Fusco would make that kind of minimal effort, as it would bring her sharp observations into contact with actual projects, and open up a space of possible transformation. More to the point: When I began my work on mapping, about four years ago now, as a direct result of involvement in demonstrations against the policies of the WTO and IMF, I too felt that the most important reference was the history of the Third World movements of national liberation, in their relations to the Western civil rights and new left movements of the 60s and 70s. In an early text that was finally published in the book Moneynations, I tried to show how the very concept of the Third World, and then above all, the reality of the Movement of Non-Aligned Nations, acted to open up new imaginary and real spaces within the dominant bi-polar map of the Cold War [http://2002.memefest.org/en/defaultnews.cfm?newsmem=15]. I asked the question whether the emergence of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre could be compared to the Bandung Conference in 1955. Obviously, the answer was that it could not: both because the current antisystemic movements do not (yet) have the strength that Bandung represented, and because the operative modes of opposition may well have changed fundamentally since 1955. The global importance of the Third World movements lay in the new kinds of international solidarity that they helped provoke. But something important remains unstated in Fusco's references to these movements, and this is the fact that the major links that tied them to the First World do not exist anymore (nor, indeed, do the movements themselves, for we are talking about specifically national movements in the period of decolonization). One of these links was an aspiration to create a non-Stalinist form of communism, according to the examples given by the successful Cuban and Vietnamese guerrilla insurgencies, and also by Yugoslav self-management (one must remember that the non-aligned movement came officially into existence in Belgrade). Another powerful link was the notion of cultural authenticity, or inherent difference from the Western norm, as a liberating foundation upon which newly independent nations could be built. This Third World concept served as a basis for the struggles toward a multicultural society in the First World. Today, however, the egalitarian aspiration to a self-managed communism has no objective touchstone in reality, leaving those who feel its lack in a deep state of ideological disarray. At the same time, the notion of cultural authenticity has been largely usurped by nationalist or fundamentalist projects which, although they have fortunately not eradicated all work towards equal rights in a multicultural society, have nonetheless made it very difficult to raise the banner of cultural or ethnic difference as a rallying-point for international solidarity. Instead of relying on the old internationalist slogans (Third Worldist or proletarian), the transnational movements of dissent that gathered strength throughout the 1990s tried to use the communicative power of the discourses of
nettime Signals, Statistics Social Experiments
.org/polimedia/display.php?id 3D27lang 3Den]. The screening on the WIPO building in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society in December 2003 could hardly been more significa nt where the intellectual property game is concerned. But the event itself was seen by a relatively small number of people and understood by even fewer; it has to be distributed. And this could be the real role of the institution in the process of contemporary governance. Take a rare example: the Public Netbase in Vienna [www.t0.or.at/t0]. Two recent projects have been exemplary: Nikeground, by 0100101110101101.org, and System 77 Civil Counter-Reconnaissance initiative, by Marko Peljhan. Both events were held on the Karlsplatz, under conditions of semi-legali ty that contributed to the meaning of the display. The first went up against a powerful transnational corporation, to undercut the norm of logo-ty ping that installs corporate worlds as the very earth beneath our feet [www.nikeground.com]. It proposed renaming the historic city square, instal ling a gigantic swoosh sculpture to redefine the very notion of public art, and of course, providing a new style of shoe to put you into intimate contact with the transfigured ground of your existence. The second took on the issues of sophisticated surveillance techniques as the exclusive pr erogative of the state [www.s-77ccr.org]. It proposed a civilian appropriation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to restore the balance between t he citizens and the police. In both cases it was necessary to engage with local bureaucrats and politicians, so as to push the artistic fiction in to the media and prolong the uncertainty surrounding its kernel of truth. Only by sparring with private interests and public authorities, while atthe same time distributing information and disinformation through every attainable channel, could Public Netbase give either of these two project s the presence they need - if we really want them to even begin to interfere with the ordinary games of governance. But is the media-art community capable of supporting such radical initiatives? DEFENDING THE TRICKSTERS The answer, on the institutional level at least, is that things don't look particularly good. Public Netbase has seen the constant trimming of its operational budget, despite being the only Viennese cultural institution to take a radical stance against the Haider governments. Now it looks li ke this impressive new-media laboratory is going to definitively close its doors, having recently laid off its entire staff and ceased its operati ons. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, a more iniquitous and dangerous situation has emerged in the United States, where Steve Kurtz of Critical Art E nsemble is on trial before a federal grand jury for a technicality concerning the way that he obtained perfectly harmless sample of e. coli bacter ia. That technicality of mail and wire fraud could carry a maximum of twenty years in prison. What kind of social truth is going to be produced by that grand jury? It's urgent everyone make a cash donation to the CAE Defense Fund, which i-n November 2004 is down to zero and needs fresh resou rces [www.caedefensefund.org]. At a certain point, money and political support become the feedback loops that really make a difference. These sorry situations are indicative of the immeasurably broader state of world affairs, which is not going to turn around very quickly. It's all very well to feel optimistic about governance theory, and to talk about power rising from below - but the question of what exactly happens on the way up can no longer be overlooked. Much more concerted efforts will have to be made, at a higher level of critique and political demand, if we w ant to keep a few experimental arenas open in the worlds of art, media and activism, to go on exploring the possibility of governing ourselves oth erwise. Brian Holmes This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-Non Commercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creative commons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime notes for the future - after Free Cooperation
[apologies for cross posting, and - ] My appreciation to those who let it all hang out and cooperate in Buffalo, and generally on the Free Cooperation list. I personally had a great time and Nathalie Magnan back in gay Paree was with us in spirit retrospectively as I told her all about it! It was a pleasure to do the opposite of the typical academic shtick in a literally desktop environment. On the last night of the conference Christoph Spehr and I had a conversation around a Thai dinner table that sparked many ideas, which I'd like to share with you. I am told that some people at the conference already found our public ruminations a little abstract and Eurocentric, and I'm afraid this attempt at a look into the political future may not be much better. Plus I'm also not sure that Christoph will entirely recognize our conversation when I get done with it - but anyway, here goes: Both of us basically think that the staying power of the long-lived, nasty, dinosaur-toothed political compromise known as neoliberalism is just about over. Wave it goodbye with massive protest and no regret. Its death throes are burning down cities, an ugly situation which may yet get worse. But the abysmally unequal exchange of finance-driven globalization has unleashed such deep conflicts - both those unfolding violently since September 11 and the civic unrest of the worldwide antiglobalization movement - that the hegemony originally put together by Reagan and Thatcher is likely to become unglued. It just ain't working. The long economic crisis that began in Mexico in 1994, peaked with the Argentine default, the Enron and Worldcom bankruptcies, the falling value of the dollar, and now has made a permanent war footing look like a viable alternative to the Imperial elites, is only the most obvious sign of this likely collapse. Another is the systematic paranoia of the total information obsession, which will not stand despite the fact that we have the technology. Symmetrical to this control obsession is the epistemological fragility of instantly produced-and-traded knowledge: despite and sometimes even because of the transmission magicians, no one is sure anymore of what the data might mean, and the volatility of the conceptual and informational environment has made coherent governance almost impossible. Meanwhile a groundswell of critique, still almost inaudible for you in the US, is daily growing. The defeat of Aznar's party in Spain is a harbinger of the end. For the Latin American governments and peoples - Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela - it's already clear that there is no alternative to the task of finding another way to run society. And now part of our job, everywhere, for years still to come, is to push these bastards out along with their ideas and their values and their geostrategies and their legal procedures and their organiz ational models and their modular management and their cynical Gucci ties and their bloodsucking IP ideologies, not to mention - to touch closer bases with some of you - their start-up opportunism and their shameless cooptation of practically any kind of art that glitters. Vampires go home! It's time to seriously revile the living dead, and start taking care of the walking wounded. And by the way, don't forget to go on destroying the core programs of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, Davos, WIPO, EU, NAFTA, FTAA, and the others. International institutions for vital negotiations? OK - but not with even of a shadow of the programs we have known for the last 25 years. Total opposition otherwise, to the GATS first of all. It's the only way to start living again. While the transition drags on, what we can fear on the peripheries of the world-system is simply more war: whether the outright obscene agression of the Imperial center, as we see right now, or the covert fomentation of local fascist (that is, armed, right-wing, elite-driven) resistance to any attempts to change the rules of social cooperation toward a more egalitarian system. I'm thinking here particular of dangerous Latin America (and today, of Caracas). What we can expect to see in the center is a classic displacement of the basic violence of economic relations into the political sphere where arguments and ideologies dispute the stage, before becoming governing regulations. I'm thinking of Eurostan, of the upcoming swing to rose (colored glasses, means: social democracy). And if you think it's green, try washing it first! Among the interesting perspectives (and this is already obvious) is the fact that the inclusion of libertarian ideas (i.e. anarchism for you Yanks) in the neoliberal construction can no longer hold. Thatcher-Reagan / Clinton-Blair was convincing because it was supposed to make you free of big government; that's down the tubes. Blair has outlived himself and his Home Secretary Blunkett now proposes jailing people for just associating with (suspected) terrorists, which is not exactly an encouragement of free association.
Re: nettime Marion von Osten: email interview with Brian Holmes
Matze writes: i cannot see why the capital should change the basis conditions of salaried labour and the social relations. Indeed. Capital, as a principle of accumulation which can only be realized by the exploitation of labor, will always tend to reinstate the same kinds of social relations, whatever the conditions. That's what Uncle Karl told me. But for better or worse, the legitimating discourses of our societies are more complex. They do not justify social relations in terms of capital accumulation, but in terms of necessity or advantage for the many. This means that a kind of gap can appear, between the necessary or the desirable, and what we actually do. As for instance today, in the age of abundance and automated production, when it no longer seems necessary that some should starve or be homeless just so others will accept any kind of work and constantly be afraid for their jobs. It's like a gap between the possible and the real. That gap is what I was trying to point to when I spoke about the fact that the technical conditions which provided a justification for the existence and exploitation of salaried labor in the Fordist period have changed entirely without any substantial change in the basic social relations. I see that as a problem. Which means: I don't accept the imperatives of capital accumulation. Looking around, I think they're totally insane, if you really want to know my opinion. In that sense I'd agree with Aliette : And if it was not more the economy which presided over the revolutionary question today but many other things...? On the one hand, utopia is the revolutionary question: that's the case for the cultural workers, whose whole production - at least when it's not just entertainment - is a questioning of values, an experimentation with the ways we relate to others and guide ourselves through time. But the other revolutionary question is hunger, the impossibility of breathing the air or drinking the water, exploitation as the limit of bare life, imposed by sheer greed. Neither of these questions have much to do with the dispute over wages, which have become the dismal mathematics of the status quo. In the midst of the crisis some Argentine friends (Etcetera) dressed up as kind of medieval warriors armed with cutlery, and drifted through the city of Buenos Aires attacking transnational supermarket vitrines with five-foot high forks and knives (actually made by workers in an occupied factory). Hunger for food, hunger for art: A Comer! (Something to Eat!) is what they called it... How can the immense majority of you still go on believing that we live in the best of possible worlds? Mind the gap, my friends... best, BH # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Reverse Imagineering: Toward the New Urban Struggles
Geert just posted some recent thoughts that Marion von Osten and I came up with on the contradictions of cultural labor. Here's a few observations about what can be done, subversively speaking. Best to all, Brian *** Reverse Imagineering: Toward the New Urban Struggles Or: Why smash the state when your neighborhood theme park is so much closer? What are the steps in the creation of a Disney attraction? According to literature sent out by WDW [Walt Disney World], the steps are: storyboard, script, concept, show models, sculpture, show set design, graphics, interiors, architectural design, molds and casting, wardrobe and figure finishing, electronic and mechanical design and manufacture, show sets and prop construction, animation, audio, special effects and lighting, and engineering. The Unofficial Walt Disney Imagineering Page (www.imagineering.org) On October 17, 2003, seven groups of some 20 to 30 persons descended into the Paris underground, with paint pots, glue, rollers, brushes, spray cans, sheets of paper and marking pens in their hands. Their aim? To overwrite, cover up, deface, subvert, recompose or simply rip to shreds as many advertisements as possible, without violence to any individual or to any piece of property other than the images which impinge on our most intimate desires. Arising against a background of aggressive cuts in public programs which had originally been designed to withdraw specific activities and times of life from market pressures - cuts which affect teachers, the unemployed, retirees, researchers and performing artists, among others - the movement declared its intention to attack the driving force of this commodification: advertising. It invades our public space, the streets, the metros, the television. It is everywhere, on our clothes, our walls, our screens. Let's resist it, with creati ve, peaceful and legitimate means. And resist it they did, organizing three more major actions in the underground before the end of the year, defacing over 9,000 advertisements and causing almost a million euros of damage - at least from the viewpoint of the organization charged with selling the display space, or more precisely, the psychic space of millions of people who ride the metro every day. The stop publicity campaigns of fall 2003 would have been unimaginable without a previous event: the cancellation of the most important summer culture festivals just a few months before, in the face of strikes by performing-arts and audiovisual workers. This movement includes actors, stage directors, set designers, decorators, dancers, choreographers, tightrope-walkers, fire-breathers, clowns and jugglers, sound and lighting technicians, costume makers, film directors and editors, gaffers, cameramen and women, best boys (and girls?), location managers, dubbers, special effects creators, animation designers and innumerable other professionals: the people whose job it is to create imaginary worlds. Since 1969, all these intermittents du spectacle had gained the right to a specific form of unemployment insurance which recognized the inherent discontinuity of artistic practice, and provided a supplemental income to cover the periods when paid labor gives way to volunteer prod uctions, rehearsals, training periods, the quest for inspiration or, more prosaically, the search for another job. But in June of 2003, the agreement governing this form of unemployment insurance was modified by the French employers' organization and three minority unions, with a change in eligibility requirements that is predicted to eliminate roughly 30% of the beneficiaries. The cancellation of the festivals had the effect of dramatizing resistance to a generalized attack on social programs. But it also revealed another surprising fact: the vast economic benefits generated by cultural activities, primarily in the form of tourist revenues (estimates ranged as high as 40 million euros for the city of Avignon alone). Never before had the functional relations between socially subsidized creativity and entrepreneurial profit appeared so clearly before the public eye. What kind of imaginary world do we want to live in? And how shall we pay for it? At the outset of the twenty-first century, on a planet at war, one of the primary social conflicts in the overdeveloped countries revolves around what some call culture, and others, entertainment. The free use or pirating of music distributed without cost through the Internet offers another example of this struggle within what the Situationists termed the spectacle. At stake are the human creations which make up our everyday environment: the fictional narratives and perceptual stimulations which, like other forms of knowledge, can be conceived either as common goods or as commodities. The essential theater of this conflict is the productive terrain of the globalized metropolis, or the so-called creative city. But not only corporations strive to create worlds for their
nettime Venezuela: reply to Ricardo Bello
money dried up, the social programs directed toward the popular sectors deteriorated, along with the support of those sectors for the heads of state. ... This situation doesn't apply in Venezuela [because levels of social spending have been maintained despite the economic downturn, as the author previously shows], and in this sense, Chavez comes closer to the classical populism of Peron, which could count on solid social base. What's more, one must not neglect Chavez's origins when trying to explain his popular support. Indeed, through his biography and his physical features, he is closely associated with the populations living in poverty in Venezuela. (www.ceim.uqam.ca/Obs_Amer/pdf/Chro_0406_Venezuela.pdf) Is a majority really ready to vote for a return to the Punto Fijo parties? Or have the middle classes come up with a new political offer (or a new populist rhetoric) that can mount a real challenge to Peronist nationalism a la Chavez? It would be interesting to hear more about that (also interesting to hear more about the alternatives to leftist Peronism, which is currently the political horizon in Argentina, and which I don't think is viable either, but that's a different story). Another paranoid Philip K. Dick scenario is to imagine a process of destabilization that radicalizes the non-violent middle classes over a failed attempt at a referendum. To see a version of this scenario, check the narconews blog at http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/3/1/21129/96112 (article posted by Martin Hardie in this thread). The manipulation of civil society organizations would be nothing new - it happens in Europe and the USA all the time. But let's hope that such nightmares remain in their cardboard boxes. The important thing is to invent and institute new models of social development which redress the gross inequalities that have accumulated over the past thirty years. I think it's a matter for everyone to be concerned about, wherever they live, which is why I have taken it up here. I am extremely aware of the role played by the USA, where I was born, in the affairs of Venezuela as of so much of the world. best to all, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime From Venezuelan Writers, Artists and Academics to their Colleagues
transformation into a very practical and urgent task for the governments entrusted with finding a new economic model for these countries, where the deindustrialized, finance-driven development model pushed in the eighties and nineties has simply failed. The reality of the last twenty years has been an exit from modern circuits of exchange for an important percentage of the middle and working classes, who are forced to join the rural and slum-dwelling populations who never got in at all. The crisis is causing the political oligarchies of Latin America to crumble one by one. This is the context for the emergence of a figure like Chavez, and for his national-populist rhetoric, which many people understandably find disturbing. But the difficulties these new governments face are enormous. Not least among them is the fact that throughout Latin America there exist broad, well-educated and well connected social strata for whom life has gotten better, wealthier, and more interesting through participation in the transnational economy. Yet the rules of that economy contribute to the crisis. To the point where the question now seems less to be whether the economic models will change, but rather how, amidst what kinds of conflicts, with what kinds of participation, through what types of social alliances and divides. Does it matter, at this point, what kind of support Latin American writers, artists and academics get from their colleagues abroad? Maybe it does. The least we can do is look for more reliable information, and try to shift the debates in our own countries, circles and professions, towards a consideration of realities in which all the globalized classes now participate. best, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime some good news from merry old England
Shock art turns on the Tate 'I'd rather go to Alton Towers than Tate Modern,' says rebel artist Chapman David Smith, arts and media correspondent Sunday November 2, 2003 The Observer They have turned shock and awe into an art form and set the agenda for the tumult over the Turner Prize. Now the Chapman brothers have broken another taboo by biting the hand that feeds them. Jake Chapman, half of the pair dubbed 'the Brothers Grim', has unleashed an excoriating attack on the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries, accusing them of threatening the future of art by bowing to the lowest common denominator. He called the Tate a 'monument to absolute cultural saturation' and said he would rather take a ride at Alton Towers than look at some of its contents. Charles Saatchi's gallery was 'simply an expression of one man's ownership'. Chapman attacked his fellow 'Young British Artists', saying they were part of a growing cult of celebrity, and claimed some now use art as 'a symptom of their ego'. Although for centuries the world's greatest artists were forced to flatter their patrons to scrape a living, the Chapmans clearly feel no obligation to be polite about Saatchi, whose =A3500,000 purchase of their installation Hell rescued them from impoverished obscurity. The leading collector paid a further =A31 million for their Chapman Family Collection of pseudo-ethnic wooden carvings and is now boosting their status among Brit Art's biggest stars with a major retrospective at his gallery on London's South Bank. Jake Chapman was even more scathing about Tate Modern, despite the brothers' attempt to win the Tate's flagship competition, the =A320,000 Turner Prize, launched last week at its sister gallery, Tate Britain. Among the brothers' Turner exhibits a sculpture entitled Death, depicting two blow-up dolls in a graphic sex act, the subject of furious debate since it was revealed by The Observer last week. Sir Nicholas Serota, the Tate director and chairman of the Turner judges, seems unshockable when viewing art, but he may find it harder to dismiss Chapman's disdain for Tate Modern, housed in the former Bankside power station Chapman said: 'You can see things at both the Saatchi and Tate Modern which are bending, swerving towards a kind of lowest common denominator which could have a very negative effect on the production of art itself.' They were 'symptomatic of an increased sensitivity to a wider public audience. It deskills the potential of serious, discursive art. 'Tate Modern is a monument to absolute cultural saturation. It's brazen about parasitically adopting this old turbine factory so even from the outside it's demonstrating the shift from industrialisation to this kind of leisure time culture. 'The architecture has been produced so that you get this huge concussive effect as you walk down the ramp. You feel very small in the face of the magnitude of this cathedral. It sends messages for miles: this is important, this is a sacred place, everything in here is sacred. Things that are sacred aren't questioned, and that's the problem.' He added: 'The idea of just ramming people up escalators to see art in this kind of pacified way makes looking at art reducible to looking and not thinking. I'd rather go to Alton Towers and go on a theme park [ride] than go and look at some [Mark] Rothko paintings. Chapman, interviewed for Channel 4's The Art Show, said the effect of some works - such as Damien Hirst's shark, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley portrait - was blunted by the way they were displayed in the Saatchi. 'Things there are trying to soften the blow for people who may be unfamiliar with the notion that a work of art shouldn't necessarily be pleasurable. So you get things like gold frames. You get things that are trying to smooth the edges between the edge of the work and the walls.' 'Within that slightly domesticated, slightly ornamental environment the work starts to dissipate. You can't work out the difference between the edge of one painting, one sculpture and the kind of ornamentation that creeps up the wall. 'It's just simply an expression of one man's ownership. The best strategy would be to put every single piece of art that Charles Saatchi owns in, so you don't get this sense that you are supposed to try and see one thing separate from another. I think it should be completely like a junk shop.' Jake, at 36 four years younger than his brother Dinos, also attacked the celebrity culture of Brit Art, dominated by the likes of Hirst and Tracey Emin, whose infamous unmade bed is in the Saatchi Gallery. 'The celebrity status has become more interesting than the work itself, so the work becomes a trace element of the trajectory of famous people,' he said. 'A lot of those artists believe that's the correct way in which the work should be analysed: them first, then the work. They treat the work as a symptom of their ego.' The Saatchi Gallery declined to
nettime The Ultimate Straussian Links
Via our friends Patrice Riemens and, apparently, John Armitage, grist for the mill of our eternal friend and ally (but please, w/o any Schmittian overtones!) Kermit Snelson, and maybe a look for y'all into Open Democracy if you don't yet know that bit of civil society - I hereby present The Ultimate Straussian Links ! Just click to your heart's content and your soul's dismay on the underlined words in the Drury interview... Don't forget the link to Kojève ! -BH Dear openDemocracy member 2 weeks ago http://www.openDemocracy.net published 'Noble lies and perpetual war', Danny Postel's interview with professor Shadia Drury. The article dissects the political philosophy of Leo Strauss: a key influence on George Bush's neo-con advisors. Drury has been tracking the rise of Strauss' ideas and disciples for many years, from obscure seminar rooms all the way to the White House. She argues that there is a current of deception and manipulation in US policy that flows directly from Strauss' doctrines - including his adaptation of Plato's idea that the 'noble lie' is a legitimate tool of government. Straussians in the Bush administration include deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, who recently acknowledged that the evidence used to justify the Iraq war was murky. If you haven't had a chance to read the article - take a look http://www.opendemocracy.net/entry_points/Noble_lies_and_perpetual_war.jsp This explosive interview has created a flurry of activity, debate and critique across cyberspace. From the Straussians own website - which unsurprisingly castigates Drury - to august institutions like Harvard, radical magazines like Mother Jones, high quality web aggregators like Arts and Letters Daily and dozens of weblogs, debate over this article, and the wider issues it raises has been colourful and intense. We want to alert you to this vibrant, entertaining debate: THE TOP FIVE http://www.straussian.net/ http://cgi.bluesmokedesign.plus.com/smokewriting/ http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1016 http://nuke.graphictruth.com/modules.php?name=Newsnew_topic=12 http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=87threadID=41851ts tart=0 SOME OTHER GOOD LINKS http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2003/43/we_595_01a.html http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/ http://www.aldaily.com Please join in by posting your responses here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=87threadID=41851ts tart=0 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime experimental politics of the state
Ryan Griffis quoted a New Hampshire woman on the libertarian Free State project: I don't like to go places that don't let me have my gun, said Ms. Casey, 33 ...I want to be a billionaire in my lifetime she added, and I don't want to live among people who think that's bad. In a strange way this does pertain to what I said in the text on the Tate. NSK created their State in Time while the redrawing of national borders provided the excuse for practically every gun in the former Yugoslavia to be fired, at every other one. Today in the Western nations it's legitimate to work up huge armies to invade countries which have lots of oil, despite what the majority thinks is right. The Tate Modern, which in principle is supposed to be about art and reflexivity, is funded by the same corporations that push the nations to use their armies. In the United States, the voting machines are private property and there are people for whom society doesn't exist. The times are really wierd. At the end of the day in London, after a pretty searching seminar, two artists named Cornfeld Cross came up to tell the story of how they spent loads of public-and-private money (handing out fifty quid notes in the end as bribes for the homestretch) to convince a businessman who owned a whole hangar of airplanes to use a red RAF jet fighter to draw an anarchist symbol in the sky with smoke. They kept saying they were on the left and how they felt slightly guilty about this project and how beautiful and seductive the plane was and how wierd that everybody on the ground crew looked the other way and one guy spent two hours adjusting two bolts. The film doesn't show the circle A, it shows you a view from the camera mounted under the wing (the left wing) and they think the film shows how beautiful and liberating and peaceful it is to fly. Art could easily become useless, irrelevant, when the planes fly. Wherever you live, the state could easily be taken over by, well, basically, fascists. I think one thing to do is to try and imagine something different and put the imaginary into tension with the real. Because the tension itself, the fact that you go on talking with people you totally disagree with, that you bring out the issues rather than the gun, is a way to work in this moment. Different, totally different than the libertarian experiment. It's a matter of building an idea and a feeling of society, creating a state of desire and exopectation, a project, a will to change. But that's just my idea. best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Artistic autonomy and the communication society
Following is the text I read in one of those rather disagreeable places to which art circles sometimes lead you. This time, the Tate Modern. The conference, held this Saturday October 25, was called Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art. Also present were Bureau d'Etudes, Francois Deck, Eve Chiapello, Jochen Gerz, Stephen Wright, John Roberts, Charles Green, and others. Important to the understanding of the gesture involved in reading such a text in a place like Tate Modern is the visual material, beginning with the photo of Jack Lang and Fidel, moving through the screen captures on the Tate's corporate patronage, with the British Petroleum adverts and so forth, and leading to the press clippings of the mounting British troop committments in Irak, and the photos of the society of leaders: Blush and Blair, Bush and Chirac, Bush and Schroeder, Bush and Berslusconi, Bush and Aznar, Bush and Bush... Then you would have further material on the marginal realms of protest and exit, and finally, on the NSK project discussed in conclusion. The aim of these kinds of interventions is to break the long-discredited, but still practically imposed taboo on publicly discussion of the social relations that lie behind our cultural institutions, which, in the case of museums like the Tate Modern, have clearly almost nothing to do with former conceptions of the public sphere, and in no way support free cooperation. To the extent that these institutions ultimately depend on a far wider circle of participants than the ones they objectively serve, maybe there's still some interest in this kind of straight talking. And beyond the aspect of denunciation, there is the question: in addition to the diffuse crativity of protest, what is a strong ambition for concentrated art today? best, Brian *** Artistic Autonomy and the communication society Among my various collaborations with Bureau d'Etudes there is this one-off journal or fanzine called Artistic Autonomy - and the communication society. This project was born out of the desire to create what seems almost non-existent in the French language: a debate about the means, results and ends of artistic practice, independent from the categories established by the state and the market. Why talk about autonomy when the major thrust of experimental art in the sixties and seventies was to undermine the autonomous work? This is the question that always arises when you speak with those for whom the institutional discourses still seem to matter. Indeed, the university careers that have been made by refuting Greenburg, by deconstructing the totality of the white male Kantian subject, and by critiquing the closure of the artistic frame are seemingly infinite. And the same holds for the paradoxes that invariably arise when mechanically reproduced works or slices of everyday life are presented in the singularizing spaces of the museum. Sometimes you wonder if the members of the art establishment are not afraid to draw the conclusions of their own ideas. Yet if one truly abandons the notion that an object, by its distinction from all others, can serve as a mirror for an equally singular and independent subject, then the issue of autonomy becomes a deep existential problem, just as it was in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, when the whole debate arose. Because for those without a substitute identity - for those without a passionate belief in their blackness, their whiteness, their Jewishness, their Muslimness, their Communistness, their Britishness or whatever - the condition of existence in the communication society, that is, the awareness that one's own mental processes are intimately traversed or even determined by a flood of mediated images and signs, is at first deeply anguishing, then ultimately anesthetizing, as the postmodern waning of the affect sets in. We work always under the pall of this postmodern anesthetic. No doubt there are thousands of exciting ways to make artworks where the question of autonomy is not at issue. But there is some doubt as to whether any of these ways of art-making can be called political. Does politics, in the democratic sense at least, not presuppose that one is somehow able to make a free decision? That one is not blindly driven by a determining, heteronomous force, whether of pain or pleasure? What does it mean to make an artistic decision? And what happens when that decision is collective? How can the sensible world - that is, the world composed by the senses, the intellect and the imagination - be reshaped according to what Fran=E7ois Deck would call a strategy of freedom? The stakes of autonomy are revealed by the etymology of the word, as has been pointed out by the political philosopher and psycho-analyst Cornelius Castoriadis. Autos means self and nomos means law. Autonomy means giving yourself your own law. But men and women are social beings; we only exist as
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
that I am something less than a democrat. Unfortunately (I mean this last word in a strong sense) democracy also appears to be something less than what it has claimed. best, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Keith Hart wrote: I think I was saying two cheers for the liberal enlightenment and what it bequeathed us, if we would acknowledge our inheritance. I am ever amazed and puzzled by Keith's confidence in the liberal enlightenment. I must say I don't share it. Acknowledging that inheritance seems to me like buying with one's spiritual faculties into a status quo of inequality, oppression and domination with which we are, to be sure, objectively complicit, by force of sheer powerlessness. Such an abandonment of the ability to discern reality from desire is, to me, unbearable. Similarly, Michael Goldhaber appears to me eminently reasonable, and perhaps lacking in historical imagination. Is a civilization like the current one replaceable? What could possibly motivate people to answer in the affirmative? Kermit Snelson's justifiable concern with the state of the Union, whether that lamentable state is attribuable to Leo Strauss or not, rather bears out the limits of Michael's reasonableness. For many years, worldly Americans have nodded their heads, quoted statistics, and pointed to demographic, economic, and psychosocial explanations that make the decay of our democracy appear quite plausible and normal. And look where that has got us. On a road which appears, in many ways, to defy reason. still waiting for a little less consensus, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Keith Hart writes about anonymity: So what's the point for nettimers or wikipedia? I have several in mind, but I prefer for now to ask you, dear reader, what you think it might be. I reckon (a little crudely I guess, but y'all know me by now) that the point will become obvious when someone has an idea dangerous enough to the equilibrium of our cream-puff-and-horror-show society, that publishing it anonymously will be a necessity and no longer just a demonstration of modesty or dandyism. still waiting for a little less consensus, Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime Re: markets, states, associations (was: reverse engineered freedom...)
Just to continue this dialogue with Ryan on the idea of concieving society as a force field between three poles: the US New Deal policies could be seen as restrictive on markets or as a tactic of preservation of them by the state. Those policies did both: and don't forget the threat posed to markets by the Soviet revolution at exactly that time. The state effectively saw restriction as preservation. Ultimately that would develop into the general picture of Keynesianism, which only took holdin Europe after the war. One of the founding analyses of Italian autonomism says that the Keynesian notion of effective demand (meaning that better wages should be paid so that worker demand can fuel the economy) is a recognition - and integration - of the working class into state capitalism. That gives you the consumer society. The whole point of autonomia in the sixties was to exit from this system of co-management. Which was an attempt to reassert some kind of existence for a pole outside both market and state. but that example only holds for the historical and ideological conditions of the US. Not at all: Nazism itself was also considered a third way between capitalism and communism. All the retreats to national management of the economy, after the breakdown of the late-nineteenth century form of globalization, were attempts to put the lid back on the detabilizing, innovating, atomizing forces of free markets and recover some kind of national, territorial cohesion. Even Stalin set out for socialism in one country. This is a kind of territorial imperative that emerges in reaction to the deterritorialization of the earlier period. I believe it lets you see a state function of solidarity (or redistribution, if you prefer) that is not reducible to the notion of the state as executive committee of the bourgeoisie (Marx). The point is that solidarity is not always pretty, even if it is sometimes very necessary. Responding to a world market crisis that is overdetermined by the extreme alienation of large parts of the world-system, Bush and the neocons are attempting to generate a new form of national cohesion and discipline on the basis of a more-or-less fascist rhetoric and division into us and them. The deterritorialization of the market-driven nineties has wreaked tremendous effects. Democratic politics is essentially the different kinds of responses that can be brought to the need for some kind of solidarity, and then the responses to the more-or-less repressive functioning of that solidarity, once it's established. But as Rancière has observed, politics in this sense is rare. Please note: I'm not saying all these things because I'm either pro-state or anti-market. It's like being for or against a hurricane. These processes are beyond us. We have to try to inflect them within the range of our capacities (generally very small). And with the commercial interests invested in military ventures in the US, which pole is dominant there? In these reactionary moments, there seems to emerge a perfect synergy betwen the private arms industry and the state's attempt to acheive national cohesion by emphasizing the role of the military. Hard to tell who's leading who: the industrialists see war as a chance to jump start the economy, the state power brokers see it as a chance to get hold of society again. But it's a dead-end synergy: after all, it was Hitler's recipe too. Today, with less intensity than in the 20s-30s, you also see the assertion of the forces outside state and market, perceived as dangerous by both. Seattle or S-11 anyone? There again, no guarantee that the autonomous demands are going to be the right ones. One of the more somber things that you can perceive with historical goggles is that the assertion of free association has in the past led to a new pact between market and state in order to just wipe out the destabilizing demands emanating from citizens (Spartacus rebellion, Spanish anarchists, the entire Western European left in the 30s, the Italian movements of the 70s, etc.). don't many of the desires shaping all of the poles transgress those boundaries? Probably it would be more clear and intuitive if you imagined the situation as a kind of love-and-death mating ritual between two armored dinosaurs, capitalism and the state, applauded, advised, hissed and booed and cheered by ecstatic and terrified citizens about the size of contemporary mice, who are constantly in danger of being crushed by either or both. If you invented coalitions of hardy spectators daring to climb up the tyranosaurus-like backbone of one of these raging monsters so as to point its head in a particular direction, or at least blinker an eyeball, then you could inject the dimension of free association into the picture. And if you revealed that the dinosaurs were actually mechanical robots, then you include the revolving-door phenomenon of all the work teams and engineers
Re: nettime Reverse Engineering Freedom and make world paper#3
David Garcia writes: There are many hells in this world and many (admittedly by no means all) of the worst occur when not only through oppressive by states, but when states break down. Without going so far as Gide's fear and trembling (David, does rhetorical excess produce rhetorical counter-excess?) I'd say that politics is all about the relation between markets, governments and voluntary associations (or civil society but the term's gotten too heavily freighted). These three poles can be found to varying degrees in all modern social activity: David is right to point out how much of our freedom depends on collective frameworks, someone else would point out that market-oriented activities have contributed most of our tools as well (I'd have some return arguments there, in fact I'd have pages and chapters of social theory on how the balances between the three poles could change, how markets could transform from the current price-fixing ones, how state functions could be reinvented etc. - but the point can stand for the moment). The internet has given a big boost to the possibilities of voluntary association, and that's where Geert and Florian's tributes to freedom are interesting, because they're trying to encourage some collective initiative. And for good reasons, cause it's currently the most interesting game in town. But I'd say the point is both to continually try to carve out more space for these free associations, and to gauge the effects they're having on the ongoing stories of market and state. Because both those awesomely powerful realities show no signs of going away tomorrow - except maybe in the realm of failed states, which, I'd like to point out, are a very prominent feature of the current period of transnational state capitalism as practiced by the powerful corporations and countries, at the expense of the weaker ones. A little decay and global chaos is just part of the price for keeping up the rapacious resource extraction and military/ideological control. There's a state of affairs that the free associates ought to try and transform - maybe with some more precise strategies than we currently have on the table. Which is not to say that the last 4 or 5 years of activism have been entirely unfruitful best to all, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime concerning these minutes
Gabriel Pickard wrote: The whole issue of mapping - Tactical Cartography provoked my attention. Of course such maps (if you haven't seen one: http://www.universite-tangente.fr.st ) are at first glance intriguing, bewildering (and possibly aesthetically epistemologically questionable - as some found), but Brian Holmes Co are aiming at an even more mind-boggling form of representing these relationships of power... I must nip a potential misunderstanding in the bud: this should read Bureau d'Etudes and Co., 'cause they are the ones who do all the work on those maps. I have theorized the work and collaborated on several projects, and because I speak English well I have explained the projects to English-speaking audiences like at N5M, but the primary credit goes overwhelmingly to Bureau d'Etudes for a tremendous amount of meticulous research and graphic realization - which at the very least has the merit of visually asking the question whether a world government exists, and if so, what it consists of. If you read French you'll also find their texts at the Universite-tangente website, lots of interesting stuff there. The fact that they choose not to use their personal names is, imo, all the more to their credit... As for the aesthetically and epistemologically questionable aspects, the comments at N5M were appreciated and hopefully some of them will be taken on board in future work, particularly the map generator if it ever does come into existence cheers, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime DNA and computers
Ongjen Strpic wrote: visionary (see http://www.foresight.org/EOC) nanoscience is increasingly abandoned and seems to be thought of as a dead end: nanobusiness is what's going on now. Eduardo Navas, writing about a nanotech researcher: Banks were very interested in this particular project, and he was negotiating with one or two. He admitted that the banks would never be able to use the full potential of what the card could offer, but that was not his problem... later on he mentioned commodities that he could buy with his deal. ** Ognjen, my friend- Can you even imagine what a million dollars will buy? The mere fact of saying that poisons one's existence through the irreversibility of this thought experiment (i.e. fantasy - and we're talking id est, for real). The possibility of curing people of this fantasy is practically nul. Only those who do not have even the most distant reason to imagine what a million dollars can buy are capable of turning their attention away from such sirens. The upshot of this is that pretty much all people who let their excellence develop in a way and in a place where it can be recognized by the socially dominant powers become totally subservient to their magnetic attraction. The few exceptions (for instance, the current stars of the various political resistance movements) are constantly balanced on a knife edge where their omnipresent reflection in the media screen is the only barrier that keeps them from falling to the temptation to simply and immediately profit from a personal capital which, they know, is in constant danger of suddenly deteriorating and becoming nothing. I am afraid that visionaries, technological and otherwise, become extremely rare under these conditions. This is a way of explaining why one might become interested in what Foucault once called la vie des hommes infames (it means something rather stronger than the lives of infamous people). best, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime WMD and the Bush Whitehouse
Henning writes: The current debates about George Bush knowingly presenting fraudulent evidence have been interpreted in some of the better German newspapers as a relatively meaningless issue. Of course the evidence was made up... Well, it's always possible to abandon any question of making democracy work and just enjoy the intellectual spectacle of power politics. There are infinite pleasures there. Real delectations. Particularly if you are waiting for the revolution you can help pass the time by exploring Fate. I suppose this is also a good way to help choose your newspapers. The good ones present the objective truth: that presidents have become emperors or kings and it's interesting to see how they do it. Actually it's always been that way. Everything is for the worst in the only possible world. Get in the habit of saying goodnight at 7 A.M. It's a way of adjusting. It will take a very long time before you actually have to participate. But by then, adaptation will have occurred. It was always that way. Doctors will write a prescription. Science will create a justification. Malthus will find a successor. Progress isn't dead! Check out the good news in some of the better German newspapers! Tomorrow is now! Enjoy it while it lasts! Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime VoteToImpeach
Here's an initiative that could work. We should figure out how to do a parallel one in Europe.. -BH How We Will Reach One Million Votes The Each One, Reach One Campaign Dear VoteToImpeach Member, Last month Ramsey Clark appealed to the 250,000 VoteToImpeach members to help build the campaign. Now, we are launching a new initiative to take this campaign to the million vote mark. The framework of the initiative could not be more simple. It is captured in its name: Each One, Reach One. We are asking all VoteToImpeach members to commit to getting just one additional person to vote to impeach online. We know that many members will do more. But if each of us got one person to vote this month we would pass the half a million mark, and if we do the same in the following months, we will have reached the million mark. These million votes will be taken to the House Judiciary Committee. Twenty-nine years ago next month, the House Judiciary Committee, with sharp division, voted for Articles of Impeachment for Richard M. Nixon. Within a month, on August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment. Let us not forget that Nixon's near-impeachment and resignation came a year and a half after he won one of the biggest landslide elections in U.S. history. Among the Articles of Impeachment, Nixon was charged with making or causing to be made false or misleading statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States The relevance of the Nixon impeachment proceedings with the case against George W. Bush et al., was noted recently by John Dean, the former counsel to President Nixon in a June 11, 2003 article titled The Case for Impeachment. Responding to the growing public outcry regarding Bush's lies and deceptions that were used as the rationale for the invasion of Iraq, Dean wrote, To put it bluntly, if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a 'high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would be also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner for any purpose.' It's important to recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power. Dean asserts, in the three decades since Watergate, this is the first potential scandal I have seen that could make Watergate pale by comparison. If the Bush administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented intelligence to get Congress to authorize, and the public to support, military action to take control of Iraq, then that would be a monstrous misdeed. When George W. Bush addressed the nation on March 17, 2003, to announce that war against Iraq had become inevitable and imminent, he stated, Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. Bush administration officials systematically lied to the people of the United States, to Congress and to the United Nations. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have now been killed and maimed. Iraq society has been plunged into chaos and misery. Its sovereignty shredded by an illegal occupation. Hundreds of US GI's have been killed and wounded. While waging an illegal war against the people of Iraq, the administration has carried out a war home -- an attack on the civil rights and liberties of the people of the United States and on the Bill of Rights itself. The VoteToImpeach campaign is a critical effort. As Ramsey Clark stated in his May 12 address at the National Press Club that was broadcast nationally on C-Span: When people vote to Impeach it is important. It reminds Americans that the Constitution provides the means for removing an Imperial President and officials who commit high crimes. The administration's crimes, including its lies and deceptions, are becoming increasingly exposed in the public discourse and media. Pressure is growing for Congressional hearings on the Administration's lies and deliberate manipulation of intelligence data related to the much ballyhooed connection between Iraq and Al' Qaeda and the patently false claim about the grave and imminent threat posed by Iraq's alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction. Under these circumstances it is all the more important to expand the grassroots VotetoImpeach campaign. Participate in the Each One, Reach One initiative, and by http://www.votetoimpeach.org/eachone.htm clicking here you will be taken to the Each One, Reach One page where you can send an email inviting one or more
nettime Fascism in the USA?
What does it mean for the average citizen to be a fascist? I do not have a certain answer to this question. Anyone with a more precise understanding should help here. It seems clear that, at least in the early phases, the average citizen carries out no directly repressive or murderous actions. Rather, it would seem that in a fascist society, s/he watches others do so without protesting, participates in collective national rituals without asking about the repressive and murderous actions being fulfilled by police or soldiers in the nation's name. At what point would one then have to conclude that the United States - and not just its current government - has become effectively fascist? The conditions may be gathering right now for that question to be answered. Three pieces of news have appeared at roughly the same time. They are: a. Rumsfeld's careless admission that Iraq may have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war. Meaning that the war was unnecessary. b. Wolfowitz's even more shocking declaration, in a recent Vanity Fair interview (quoted today in Le Monde), that the issue of weapons of mass destruction was chosen for bureaucratic reasons, i.e. as the only issue that could generate sufficient consensus in Washington to go ahead with the attack. c. The revelation, by the BBC's investigative reporters (relayed in The Nation), that the heroic media spectacle provided by US Army reporters of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch was entirely staged, having taken place in reality after the hospital in which she was being held had been abandoned by Iraqi forces. The first and and above all the second items strongly suggest that distorted intelligence was deliberately used to justify the war and thereby make it possible. The third item baldly shows the extent to which the US Army is ready to fabricate propaganda for domestic consumption, and the news networks such as Fox and CNN, to relay that propaganda. In Great Britain, a former member of Blair's cabinet, Robin Cook, who left the government in protest over the war, is now part of a move to demand investigation of similar falsifications, particularly the statement concerning Iraq's capacity to strike at Britain within forty-five minutes, which was attributed to British intelligence services. If in the United States no serious and deep public questioning arises concerning the use of false intelligence and reporting to justify the declaration and pursuit of war, if such questioning is not accompanied by formal political and legal investigation, then I think we would have to face the disastrous reality that significant sectors of the world's wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation are willing to be lied to by their leaders. I'm not saying this is necessarily the case. I'm saying this looks like a real test. If a majority, or even a preponderant minority of American citizens are collectively willing to go through all the rituals of bellicosity and superpatriotism, but unwilling to demand investigation into the facts which are supposed to have made those rituals necessary, then one would have to very seriously ask the question whether a fascist society is not emerging in the USA. And given the interlinked nature of power in the world today, one would have to look around, not only in Britain but everywhere in the developed countries, and assess the level of functional agreement with this American fascism. Not to do so, and not to argue publically against these trends, would be to participate in their development. It would become extremely unwise, for instance, to wait for a more convincing test: Bush's reelection. My opinion is that if Bush is reelected, the US will have become, without any more doubt, a predominantly fascist society. While nervously awaiting that moment of truth, I'd appreciate it if people currently inside the US could give their observations on the way this first test unfolds. Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime George Soros: An Allergic Reaction To The BushDoctrine
which the double-sided nature of enlightened capitalist idealism has pushed our market societies. The current war shows how vital it is to go beyond that schizophrenic way of thinking. Because the charitable likes of financiers such as George Soros are inevitably bound to their horrifying opposites: in this case, George Bush. The speculative bubble of the roaring 90s is as close to the wartime terror of the collapsing 00s as Doctor Jekyll is to Mister Hyde. So what was the secret potion that put one of them inside the other's skin? It was the magic of the marketplace that Reagan and Thatcher forced down our throats in the 1980s. Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime We Plebeians
to the imminent specter of war? In other words: Will the EU be forced by its people into creating a division within the Occidental heart of Empire? To be sure, those 80 percent are opposed to a war outside the UN framework; and despite Chirac's posturing and Schroeder's pollling strategies, the miserable probability is that the European leaders will finally bow to US pressure from within the UN, pushed on by the imperative to maintain the monarchical courts of transnational military cooperation. After all (propaganda is when you repeat) 80 percent are opposed to a conflict *outside* the UN framework But what if the advance information proves correct: what if the onslaught in Iraq will be inaugurated by what military strategist Harlan Ullman calls the principle of Shock and Awe, whereby the Allies launch up to 800 cruise missiles in two days - more than all that fell in the forty days of the first Gulf War? This is a strategy for the massacres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Guernica and Dresden, in our time, for no justifiable reason. Peter Turnley's photographs from the Mile of Death during the last Gulf War already show what this can mean. This is not a just war. The Texas Crown is opening the door to hell on earth. What we plebeians must envision is a general strike on a world scale, if it comes to such a day. An urban strike, a blockage of our cities, like the piqueteros in Argentina, but everywhere. We no longer need to wait for the unions, we no longer need to wait for the political parties, their members will be ahead of them, in the streets. Only a credible threat from below can stave off the treachery of our so-called leaders. We must prepare with every possible form of communication, in whispers that become a roar. Prepare for what? A total stoppage of all the world's cities in the event of war: an exodus from hell on earth, reasonable, deliberate, peaceful and unbending. We plebeians can break the power that calls for a world of war. Brian Holmes Essential links: - Harlan Ullman et al., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance: http://www.dodccrp.org/shockIndex.html - Peter Turnley's photographs of the Gulf War: www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Revenge of the Concept
[hi, nettimers -- someone kindly pointed out brian's original message, below, had somehow been lost in the nettime.org ar- chives and replaced with keith hart's response. since We Do Not Meddle With The Archives, the simple solution is to send it to the list again. sorry for the noise. -- cheers, t] [Following is the lecture I gave at the expo Geography - and the Politics of Mobility in Vienna. It revists the gift economy debates, via Karl Polanyi, with some new ideas thanks to the talks at the WorldInfoCon, all in the hope of understanding networked mobilizations. Plenty of things for nettimers to disagree with anyway! - BH.] The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance Since June 18, 1999, I have been involved in a networked resistance to the globalization of capital. This resistance has been inextricably connected to art. It has taken me from London to Prague, from Quebec City to Genoa and Florence. It has given me an interest in experimental uses of advanced technology, like the Makrolab project. It has pushed me to explore new organizational forms, like the research network developed by Multiplicity. It has encouraged me to support cross-border solidarity movements, like Kein Mensch ist illegal. And it has resulted in collaborations with Bureau d'études, in their attempts to map out the objective structures of contemporary capitalism. But the experience of the movement of movements has also led me to ask a subjective question. What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option? Or are we not becoming what we believe we are resisting? Are the multitudes the very essence and driving force of capitalist globalization, as some theorists believe? To look deeper into this question, consider the work of Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, who observed how artistic practice was being integrated to the finance economy of London during the late 1990s. These critics pointed to the establishment of convergence zones, culture clubs sponsored by private enterprise and the state. In these clubs, so-called culturepreneurs could seek new forms of sponsorship for their ideas, while businessmen sought clues on how to restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative teams of creative, autonomous individuals. Basing themselves on the new culture clubs, Davies and Ford claimed that we are witnessing the birth of an alliance culture that collapses the distinctions between companies, nation states, governments, private individuals - even the protest movement. For unlike most commentators from the mainstream artworld, these two critics had immediately identified a relation between the activism of the late 1990s and contemporary forms of artistic practice. But what they saw in this new activism was the expression of a conflict between the old and the new economy: Demonstrations such as J18 represent new types of conflict and contestation. On the one hand you have a networked coalition of semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the hierarchical command and control structure of the City of London police force. Informal networks are also replacing older political groups based on formal rules and fixed organisational structures and chains of command. The emergence of a decentralised transnational network-based protest movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that are slow in shifting from local and centralised hierarchical bureaucracies to flat, networked organisations. The alliance theory of Davies and Ford combines the notion of a network paradigm, promoted by people like Manuel Castells, with an anthropological description of the culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural studies. But what they portray is more like an economization of culture. In fact their network theory draws no significant distinction between contemporary protest groups and the most advanced forms of capitalist organization. As they conclude: In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense with tangible centres, the oppositionality that has characterised previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful model. These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already quite confusing for the movement. But they took on an even more troubling light when the Al Quaeda network literally exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could now be called oppositional, it was that of the Islamic fundamentalists. Their
Re: nettime revenge of the concept
Keith Hart says that my text ...legitimately invokes the work of Karl Polanyi in support of an anti-market economics, but he does not point out that Polanyi looked to the planning structures of socialist states to implement redistribution as an alternative to the market. True enough - I'm mainly interested in Polanyi's analysis of how things fall apart, as there are signs of very similar processes right now. As for Mauss: He and Polanyi agreed that the attempt to separate the self-regulated market from social life was disastrous, but Mauss wanted the inherently social character of markets to be more explicitly recognized... Now that's interesting! And it would mean changing the markets. If Polanyi says that self-regulating markets are a fiction it's because in the real world of contemporary Western civilization they obviously do not work on an egalitarian basis, they favor concentrated capital which increasingly sets the hidden rules to favor more concentration. That's why neoliberal state capitalism is not a contradiction in terms: cf. the WTO, the main developments in IP law, etc. Today's version of the state is about security and markets regulated in the favor of big corps, with laissez-faire and self-regulation ideology as the fig-leaf. Keith likens me to exoticizing anthropologists: ... by drawing a line between gift economies and those dominated by buying and selling, these anthropologists demarcate a zone of exclusive professional expertise, beyond the reach of economists and other social scientists. Political activists who wish to carve out an anti-capitalist economic domain using the net are fundamentally similar. There might be substance to this critique, but it's also true that I contrast,not so much gift economies and the market, as self-organized cooperative production and what I call the flexible personality - a name for the way that contemporary trends in labor organization and management tend to structure our entire culture. Where I think the whole argument suffers from a lack of precision on both sides is that I'm not fundamentally against money (i'm not against a symbolic language of exchange), but I'm against the exorbitant kind of rents now being extracted by speculative capital. When I talk about domination, that's part of what I mean. By the same token (sorry, die-hard anarchists) I'm not metaphysically against every kind of institution (even those integrated to the state), and Mauss wasn't either, far from it! But neoliberal state capitalism is bad news and getting worse. The problem is making the social institutions of reciprocity work for people, different kinds of people, without destroying their sustaining environment. Mauss is revealed as a socialist of the co-operative labour persuasion, with affinities to movements in Britain, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia... Roughly speaking, the co-operative socialists believed in self-organization from below, like the anarchists and to some extent the liberals. They believed in the unity of collective and individual interests, as in the co-operative movement, where combination in the market went with private property. They were against the state and for the market. I suspect that the last sentence is a simplification (I'll read up to find out). But the preceding part, on self-organization from below, is very close to what I talked about in my lecture. And now comes the most interesting part, about the difference betwen market and gift reciprocity: The main difference between the two forms lay in the timing of the return, which in the case of the gift was delayed and in the market contract simultaneous. Because givers in all cultures are superior to receivers, that gap between the gift and its return was a source of inequality, even as it sustained a spiritual and personalized version of society; whereas participants to a contract walk away free and equal, if alienated and alone. Tell the people working for today's interim agencies, or at your local supermarket, that they can walk away free and equal from their contract with their employer! Free and equal to starve or obey, I guess. And don't even bother to ask the people who are producing for the supermarkets, not in France at least: they are fantastically exploited, forced under oligopolistic conditions to sell on the very edge of survivability. As for the difference in time: an exchange at your local outdoor vegatable market is instantaneous. But the finance economy of today, with all its forms of credit-money, is actually based on the deferral of reciprocity: you get your profit (or loss) later, with a delay. The possibility of waiting for your profit is one of the defining characteristics of the speculator. So money can be involved in a delay, with serious inequalities resulting. The lesson I'm drawing from this interesting criticism is that the arguments aren't precise enough, or situated enough. For instance, the kind of potlatch I have discussed at the
nettime Revenge of the Concept
[Following is the lecture I gave at the expo Geography - and the Politics of Mobility in Vienna. It revists the gift economy debates, via Karl Polanyi, with some new ideas thanks to the talks at the WorldInfoCon, all in the hope of understanding networked mobilizations. Plenty of things for nettimers to disagree with anyway! - BH.] The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance Since June 18, 1999, I have been involved in a networked resistance to the globalization of capital. This resistance has been inextricably connected to art. It has taken me from London to Prague, from Quebec City to Genoa and Florence. It has given me an interest in experimental uses of advanced technology, like the Makrolab project. It has pushed me to explore new organizational forms, like the research network developed by Multiplicity. It has encouraged me to support cross-border solidarity movements, like Kein Mensch ist illegal. And it has resulted in collaborations with Bureau d'études, in their attempts to map out the objective structures of contemporary capitalism. But the experience of the movement of movements has also led me to ask a subjective question. What are the sources of this networked resistance? And what exactly is being resisted? Is revolution really the only option? Or are we not becoming what we believe we are resisting? Are the multitudes the very essence and driving force of capitalist globalization, as some theorists believe? To look deeper into this question, consider the work of Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, who observed how artistic practice was being integrated to the finance economy of London during the late 1990s. These critics pointed to the establishment of convergence zones, culture clubs sponsored by private enterprise and the state. In these clubs, so-called culturepreneurs could seek new forms of sponsorship for their ideas, while businessmen sought clues on how to restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative teams of creative, autonomous individuals. Basing themselves on the new culture clubs, Davies and Ford claimed that we are witnessing the birth of an alliance culture that collapses the distinctions between companies, nation states, governments, private individuals - even the protest movement. For unlike most commentators from the mainstream artworld, these two critics had immediately identified a relation between the activism of the late 1990s and contemporary forms of artistic practice. But what they saw in this new activism was the expression of a conflict between the old and the new economy: Demonstrations such as J18 represent new types of conflict and contestation. On the one hand you have a networked coalition of semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the hierarchical command and control structure of the City of London police force. Informal networks are also replacing older political groups based on formal rules and fixed organisational structures and chains of command. The emergence of a decentralised transnational network-based protest movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that are slow in shifting from local and centralised hierarchical bureaucracies to flat, networked organisations. The alliance theory of Davies and Ford combines the notion of a network paradigm, promoted by people like Manuel Castells, with an anthropological description of the culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural studies. But what they portray is more like an economization of culture. In fact their network theory draws no significant distinction between contemporary protest groups and the most advanced forms of capitalist organization. As they conclude: In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense with tangible centres, the oppositionality that has characterised previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful model. These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already quite confusing for the movement. But they took on an even more troubling light when the Al Quaeda network literally exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could now be called oppositional, it was that of the Islamic fundamentalists. Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory of a decisive transformation in organizational structures, and Samuel Huntington's culturalist theory of the clash of civilizations. Suddenly the protest movement could identify neither with the revolutionary form of the network, nor with the oppositional refusal of the capitalist
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
of imagining, then articulating an alternative coordination that can operate on the regional/world scales. But I'm willing to look at the arguments! I suppose it has something to do with legal and technical architectures allowing trade between freely associating individual producers, outside of the price-fixing markets that corporations create to their advantage under state capitalism. But haven't we had these arguments on nettime before (digital artisans, post-fordist labor, De Landa's borrowings from Braudel on small-scale markets)? And don't those kinds of alternative economies also depend on the existence of socialized commons? Sounds like multitudes to me. Not all the Left is against that kind of thinking. But whatever you want to call it, the tough and truly political question is how to institute some more egalitarian relations in this crazy world. Brian Holmes # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: nettime joxe's empire of disorder
This sentence from Joxe is terribly intriguing: In the current disorder, it is preferable to organize a sphere of political fraternity with citizens and without states, rather than sitting back to watch the victory of the transnational wealthy classes and their smiling neofascism. Can you expand on what that means for him, MacKenzie? It's pretty enigmatic. I think it's correct to say that the reorganization of production has opened up a planetary division of labor and a new class conflict - and the notion of predatory capitalists looking for slave labor is hardly exaggerated, when wages suffice only to pay for minimal food. I also agree that sabre rattling is a distraction from this conflict, particularly at moments of economic crisis like right now. These analyses are broadly shared within the counter-globalization movement. The problem is, to what extent does a public sphere for discussion of such issues effectively exist, anywhere? In Italy, the US and France, electoral bids by parties that could potentially name the class conflict have resulted in a brutal shift from a complacent center left to an aggressive right. The class conflict, which is overdetermined by cultural and historical issues in any case, then gets blurred out of existence by security rhetoric. Meanwhile, the social forum movement in Europe and Latin America is courted by the same old center left, at the risk of extinguishing its basic messages. The humanitarian NGOs seem to respond best to the notion of a transnational fraternity (which is another name for solidarity); but they are persuasively critiqued as fig leafs covering up the withdrawal of more extensive social programs formerly run by state governments. I'm curious as to what Joxe is really suggesting. My personal opinion is that only coordinated transnational strikes, at the European level on a minimum, can bring an effective transnational civil society (if you want to call it that) into being. But such strikes cannot be mounted on the traditional union issues of wages-conditions-benefits, because they would not be inclusive enough. The best proposal I heard at the European Social Forum was for a general strike in the event of a US war on Irak. One can imagine the participation of a few large unions encouraging significantly larger numbers of non-unionized people to take the risk of stopping work, while every kind of association joins them out on the streets. This kind of action seems necessary, if we want to get beyond good cosmopolitan-idealist intentions, a la Habermas. Of course, one can argue that no structure exists to organize such a strike. But that is precisely the issue: achieving organizational power (or even disorganizational power) on a large enough scale to stand up to the liberal-fascism of the transnational wealthy classes. We're not there yet. - BH # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
