"Nothing Natural///Black Planet"

Adrian Gargett

"War is not conceptualised here in Clausewitz's sense -- an implement of policy. War in its extremist sense is not an implement of any kind, and not in the slightest a political one. The comparison of war to politics is not -- in actuality -- one of methodological supplementary, but more exactly, one of the uncontested to the area of its possible circumscription. Only when it has been ordered/disciplined, and repressed in its tropism to total subjugation, can the miserable dog we understand as 'war' be suppressed to the influence of policy; as the negative force of the state. War breaks out of the Clausewitzean definition to embrace its wilder qualities; the cosmological nobility illustrated by Herakleitus, and the lines of hydraulic complexity traced by Sun Tzu. There is equally an inexorable signification in which war is beautiful -- particularly when contrasted to the sickening inanity of work -- given that even its desolate appearances overrun into something severe, flowing, and wild. War is an excessiveness of chances, which are fairly uniform with its shocking cruelty as a despised evil spirit trailing a grisly bloodbath, the gutter breeding-ground of vermin and contagion. Whatever its horrific fascination, there is nothing more overwhelmingly demeaning than war. It alone is truly base."

Full story: http://newworlddisorder.ca

"All Aboard the Black Magic Bus!"

Adam Gorightly

"Dean nodded in approval, and had his friend put the gun away and leave the house. Manson then handed the portly and balding preacher a tab of acid. 'Here, this will keep your blood pressure down.' Dean paused, gave the pill a blank look, and downed it with a sip of soda. Then he began where he'd left off, telling Charlie what his life was going to be like after he was condemned to Hell for 'doing' his lovely young daughter. After awhile -- as the acid started to take hold -- Morehouse began to mellow out, and reconsider his position. Charlie advised Dean that he might want to get in his friend's car and go home, and Dean agreed to this suggestion. When he came looking for Charlie again a few weeks later, it wasn't for his daughter's sake, but because he was in search of more acid. Charlie had revealed to Dean 'The Way of the Bus', and The Way was Psychedelic. Like many another spiritual searcher from the spaced-out 60's, LSD had opened Morehouse's mind, but unfortunately the vacuum between his ears was soon to be filled with the ambiguous metaphysical psycho-babble of Charlie Christ."

Full story: http://newworlddisorder.ca"

hydrarchist writes:

"The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorization, Autonomia"

Mark Coté

What powers must we confront, and what is our capacity for resistance, today when we can no longer be content to say that the old struggles are no longer worth anything? And do we not perhaps above all bear witness to and even participate in the ‘production of a new subjectivity’?
— Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, p. 115

I want to seek a productive space between cultural studies and political economy by remembering autonomia, a theoretical and political tendency of the Italian radical left, developed ‘from below’ in the 1960s. Autonomia emphasised the self-organizing capacity of labour and everyday practices, in decentralized, nonhierarchical structures. It also strongly rejected not only the Soviet model, and the Stalinist party with its centralized leadership, but by and large representational politics. By the 1970s, autonomia had become a heterogeneous grouping of students, labour, women, and the marginalized. In some strands of autonomia—it has always been a diffused and contested movement —there was an increasingly strong influence of French poststructuralist thought, especially by Foucaultian microphysics of power and Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the inherent productivity of desire and subjectivity. These influences are manifested perhaps most clearly in the autonomist concept of the ‘social factory’ which sees power and productivity as dispersed, emanating as much in subjectivities, everyday life, and cultural practices as in traditionally-defined ‘factory labour.’
My longer-term interest is in the complex relationship between subjectivity, autonomy, and capitalist reproduction. For now, I want to take a figure well known in cultural studies—Michel Foucault—and remake him, in order to introduce what myself and others have taken to calling the ‘communication school’ of autonomist thought. To do so, I am following the Foucauldian impulse of ‘fabrication.’ That is, I want to construct all the necessary travelling documents in order to take Foucault on a spatial and temporal journey to a particular Italy—to make up the ‘Italian Foucault.’ In constructing the ‘fiction’ of the ‘Italian Foucault’ I am not willfully misconstruing an historical and theoretical narrative; rather, I am seeking lines of affinity in order to stimulate the imaginary in terms of what might be done—in terms of scholarly pursuits between cultural studies and marxist political economy; and in terms of our practices in everyday life. Thus, this paper will give Foucault the credentials of a particular kind of ‘marxist’, and take him through some foundational automonist texts before setting him down in the Bologna, first circa 1977, and then today.

"The Slaves of Money -- And Our Rebellion"

Subcomandante Marcos, EZLN, September 11, 2003

Brothers and sisters of Mexico and the world, who are
gathered in Cancun in a mobilisation against neo-
liberalism, greetings from the men, women, children and
elderly of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. It
is an honour for us that, amid your meetings,
agreements and mobilisations, you have found time and
place to hear our words.