The Shock of Violence

By Steffen Boehm
from Sign of the Times

I took your paper to read at home just after the events last Friday in London. I was very shocked with the descriptions, made by eye witnesses, of the way the guy had been shot. So, I read your text with this thought always present. I read it with my body, feeling the discomfort of the 'truth' of your words and, at the same time, the fear of our weakness and the difficulties we have to face in order to exercise the violence of critique in these days. The next day I knew that the murdered guy was a Brazilian – someone 'innocent' in many senses, as well as nameless. Probably for this fact, I realized that part of the discomfort I was feeling had to do with memory. All the statements of the British authorities were related to the need of the new procedures, were the defence of the state of exception. This was the name given by the Brazilian dictators for the suppression of the state of rights, when citizens’ rights were suspended in the name of the need to protect the order and the public against the enemy. I’m clearly shocked because some of the elementary principles of liberal democracy are being eliminated. If liberal democracy is not enough, totalitarianism is always worst. - Maria Ceci Misoczky; edited excerpt of an email sent to Steffen Böhm on 25 July 2005

I’m quoting the above email with a purpose in mind. In my view, it clearly expresses the state of emergency – or the moment of danger, as Walter Benjamin calls it – we find ourselves at this very moment. Maria, a Brazilian educator from Porto Alegre, responded with her email to my paper ‘The Moment of Danger: Benjamin’s Critique of Violence’, which I had submitted to the editors of a book last week. I had written that book chapter in response to my experience of being in Scotland for the anti-G8 protests and the London bombings that took place on 7 July 2005. Since this book chapter will not be published until early 2006, and since it will probably be read by only a handful of people, I would like to take this opportunity to make some of the reflections offered in that chapter available to a wider audience.

"In the Long Run…

…We Will All Be Indian"

Jamal Mecklai

Keynes was wrong. Darwin was right.

Keynes famously said, “In the long run, we will all be dead.” Of course, he was speaking just of himself and people around him. I am speaking of all humankind. Darwin, too, was speaking of the species of man, and he famously recognized that diversity is the basis for sustainability – something that environmentalists have been trying to sell the world’s populist leaders on.

Last week, I met an interesting gentlefella – American, venture capitalist with Sand Hill Road pedigree and investments in many diverse parts of the globe. His first time in India, though, and he was curious about several (to me) very obvious elements of the culture. Being men – all right, boys – we, of course, talked about women. He told me that he was amazed that when he (and his wife) had asked an Indian woman to take their photograph, the woman took his camera and handed it to the man with her, who, smiled at them and took the photograph. In America, he said, any woman would have taken the photograph thinking nothing of it. Even in China, where he had spent a lot of time, this would not have been an issue. He was surprised and curious, and wanted to know more about the difference between the sexes in India and whether it was different in the case of Hindus or Muslims and so on.

Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial Thoughts

Ned Rossiter

During a teaching stint at Tsinghua University in May this year, and then following the trans-Siberian conference organised by Ephemera Journal in September, I started preliminary research on creative industries in Beijing. What follows is a brief report on my experiences, perceptions and meetings in Beijing. My interest is to discern the constellation of forces that might be taken into consideration in future analyses as the research project develops. I should also state that this brief overview of Beijing’s creative industries is part of a collaborative project that undertakes a comparative study of international creative industries. The research seeks to go beyond economistic interpretations of creative industries by focussing on inter-relations and geo-political tensions between trans-local and global cultural flows as they manifest around issues such as labour conditions, intellectual property rights (IPRs), social-technical networks and cultural practices.

From the start, there are many factors and variables that make it questionable to even invoke the term “creative industries” in the Chinese context. Such complications amount to a problematic in translation of the creative industries concept. For the most part, there is little variation at a policy level as governments internationally incorporate the basic ingredients of creative industries rhetoric (clusters, mapping documents, value-chains, creative cities, co-productions, urban renewal, knowledge economies, self-entrepreneurs, etc.) into their portfolio of initiatives that seek to extract economic value from the production of cultural content and provision of services. This would suggest that creative industries, as a policy concept, is divorced from the materialities that compose cultural economies as distinct formations in national and metropolitan settings.

antiproperty writes:

Whose Class Struggle?
Floyce White

The struggle over semantics is one facet of the overall struggle against capitalism. The conflict over wording does not "go away" no matter what well-intentioned temporary truce you make before a meeting. Pro-capitalists treat your acquiescence as gullibility, and redouble their efforts to impose their terminology. To "play politics" with what you believe to be true is to tell a lie.