Mar 5 2009 4:30 pm
Mar 5 2009 6:30 pm
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Radars & Fences II Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/ Thursday, March 5, 2009 4:30 PM - 8:30 PM NYU School of Law Information Law Institute 40, Washington Square South Room 218 Radars & Fences II features five researchers and artists who have been at the forefront of the battle for the democratization of the life sciences over the last decade: Beatriz da Costa, Natalie Jeremijenko, Richard Pell, Claire Pentecost, and Paul Vanouse will present their own work and discuss with the public models of interdisciplinary engagement at the beginning of the "biological century." Please RSVP at http://www.nyu.edu/media.culture/events/event.html?e_id=1336
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Can Christiania Survive? A Countercultural Enclave in Denmark Fights for its Life By Charles Hayes, http://www.reason.com/news/show/131418.html Pusherstreet isn’t what it used to be. The leading source of retail cannabis in all of Denmark, in one of the largest and oldest anarchic enclaves in all of Europe, is no longer the bustling, friendly spice bazaar of years gone by. There’s a raw, on-the-hunt, bracing vibe here now. Young, shaven-head toughs in drab garb gather around fires in metal barrels, surreptitiously directing the illicit traffic. Mutts wander unleashed, some trained to whisk contraband away in the event of a raid by the politi (police).
The Financial Crisis and the Fourth World War Shawn Hattingh For the last three decades a vicious war, the Fourth World War, has been waged on the people of the world by the global political and corporate elite[1]. They have unleashed a whole array of economic weapons, from trade liberalisation to privatisation to financial liberalisation, to enrich themselves at the expense of the vast majority of people. As part of this onslaught, welfare systems have been attacked, workers rights have been undermined, and environmental legislation has been savaged. The aim of all of these measures was to spread capitalism into every aspect of people’s lives. Everything, including culture, social relations, the environment, water and even air were turned into commodities to be bought and sold. While the richest 400 people on Earth used this system to amass vast amounts of money (more money than the poorest 3 billion people combined), over 18 million people died every year for the last 20 years because of poverty[2]. When people protested that all of this inequality and deprivation were unfair – and demanded that people should be provided with quality education, quality healthcare, food, and clean water; they were told by the elite not to be ridiculous. In fact, people were simply told that no-one had the money to provide such ‘luxuries’ as food, quality healthcare and quality education. Yet, when some of the largest companies got into trouble in the last 20 years, states have rushed to bail them out. For instance, when the savings & loan debacle erupted during the Bush Snr years, the US government spent at least $ 200 billion in public money bailing out some of the corporations involved[3]. At very the same time, Bush Snr and then Clinton were working hard to attack the poor through cutting welfare. Such is the world we have come to live in. It is a world where profits have been privatised for the rich, while losses and misery have been socialized for the poor - a world of the Fourth World War.
Beyond Shopping Bernard Marszalek The Financial Times reports that at Davos the treasure hunt, so to speak, was for that elusive plan to curb the worldwide financial meltdown. If the luminaries of world capital came away luckless and no better informed than when they arrived, I suspect that the half-wits and dead-beats in Washington (best exemplified by Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers) will not succeed either. No surprise that fewer politicians attended Davos this year than in previous years when Davos was a celebratory event. Nothing corrodes the finely spun verbosity of politicians swifter than the acidic spray of reality. The few politicians who did attend simply made fools of themselves with their exchange of accusatory remarks. Recession, Depression or Panic? Politicians speak only of recession as do most journalists. Popular columnists of a liberal bent define the crisis with a broader selection of terms, yet they are all snared in the traps of a poorly informed historic perspective. This insures that their endeavors to provide informed analysis will be fruitless. Quick fixes of a neo-Keynesian kind that they propose, may at best slow the hemorrhaging of world capital, but far more radical procedures are needed to save this patient.
Feb 27 2009 5:00 pm
Feb 27 2009 10:00 pm
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Communism is Back and We Should Call It Singularity a book launch and discussion with Franco “Bifo” Berardi :: Friday February 27th, 2009 Octagon Room, People’s Palace, 5PM University of London, Queen Mary Mile End Road, London E1 4NS “One hundred years ago Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism. It inaugurated a century that believed in the future – initiating a process where the collective organism became machine-like. This becoming-machine has reached its finale with the concatenations of the global web and is now being overturned by the collapse of a financial system founded on the futurisation of the economy, debt and economic promise. That promise is over. The era of post-future has begun.” – From the Manifesto of Post-Futurism Franco Berardi will be discussing communism as singularity and presenting his books. The event marks the first and long awaited publication of his work in English: Félix Guattari. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography (2008) and Precarious Rhapsody: Semio-capitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (forthcoming).  
Feb 11 2009 6:17 pm
Feb 22 2009 6:17 pm
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Amir Mogharabi / Sean Raspet “To One Whose Love was Service” LIMITED ENGAGEMENT Tuesday, February 10 – Feb. 22
The Nights of Labor Revisited Jacques Ranciere Preface to the Hindi edition of The Nights of Labor: the workers’ dream in 19th century France. Trans. Abhay Dube. English Trans. Rana Dasgupta . To be published by Sarai The Indian reader who opens this book in 2009 will no doubt think it is a strange thing. How can these stories of nineteenth-century French lockmakers, tailors, cobblers and typesetters be relevant to the information revolution, the reign of immaterial production or the global market? This question, it should be said, was already present for the French reader who opened this book twenty-seven years ago. We did not speak yet of globalization, nor of the end of the proletariat, of history or of utopia. Quite the contrary: France had recently elected a combined socialist and communist government, which proudly laid claim to the traditions of Marxism and of working class politics. And it is in this context that the book seemed to run counter to its own time, and became difficult to classify. The author was a professional philosopher who had struck his first blows, in the 1960s, by participating in the theoretical enterprise of Louis Althusser, who wished to rebuild Marxist theory. Now, instead of offering philosophical theses, he was telling stories about the French working class of the nineteenth century. And he offered nothing by way of Marxism – no analysis of the forms of industrial production, of capitalist exploitation, of social theories or of class struggles or worker movements. His workers, moreover, were not “real” workers; they were artisans from olden times, dreamers who dabbled in poetry and philosophy, who got together in the evening to found ephemeral newspapers, who became intoxicated by socialist and communist utopias but for the most part avoided doing anything about them. And the book seemed to lose itself in the aimless wanderings of these people, following the dreams of one, or the little stories others recounted in their diaries; the letters they wrote about their Sunday walks in the Paris suburbs, or the everyday concerns of those who had left for the United States to try out their dream of fraternal communalism. What on earth were readers to do with these stories in 1980? The question is not, therefore, one of geographical or temporal distance. This book may seem untimely in an era that proclaims the disappearance of the proletariat, but it also seemed so in the previous era, which claimed to represent the class that had been united by the condition of the factory and the science of capitalist production. Let me put it simply: this book is out of place in a postmodern vision for the same reasons that it was already out of place in a classical modernist vision. It runs counter to the belief, shared by modernism and postmodernism alike, in a straight line of history where cracks in the path of time are thought to be the work of time itself – the outcome of a global temporal process that both creates and destroys forms of life, consciousness and action. This book rejects this because, despite its apparent objectivity, such an idea of time always places a hierarchy upon beings and objects. The belief in historical evolution, said Walter Benjamin, legitimizes the victors. For me, this belief legitimizes the knowledge that decrees what is important and what is not, what makes or does not make history. It is thus that the social sciences have declared that these little stories of workers taking an afternoon walk, or straying far from the solid realities of the factory and the organized struggle, have no historical importance. In doing so they confirm the social order, which has always been built on the simple idea that the vocation of workers is to work – and to struggle – good progressive souls add – and that they have no time to lose in wandering, writing or thinking.
To Place Oneself Within a 'We' Jason Adams Review of John Moore and Spencer Sunshine, ed. I Am Not a Man, I am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Brooklyn: Autonomedia 2004. 147 pages. ISBN 1-57027-121-6 (pbk.) From Theory & Event Volume 11, Issue 4, 2008 Like that of many of the other French thinkers who question the late modern principium individuationis, Foucault's thought has proven over the decades to be particularly prone to divergent interpretations of how it might be put to political use. Ranging, for instance, from the "post-Marxism" of Ernesto Laclau, to the "radical liberalism" of William Connolly, to the "post-anarchism" of Todd May, it has been repeatedly claimed as the basis for quite distinct ends. And yet, in classic Nietzschean fashion, he himself argued explicitly against the reduction of critical thought as such to the "we" of any exclusive, pre-formed ideologico-political orientation.1 Instead, Foucault's more Dionysian, transversally-oriented disposition lead him to proclaim that "the [real] problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a 'we' in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a 'we' possible by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the 'we' must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result - and the necessarily temporary result - of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it".2 Like many of his post-Nietzschean contemporaries in the Francophone world who were also more interested in "self-overcoming" than in staticizing political identities, Foucault distrusted categorically-driven polemics because of the Manichean reifications and instrumentalizations of thought that they tended to inspire. By defining a constitutive outside he seemed to suggest, one often sets up an arbitrarily-defined political symptomatology, in which "symptoms are named, renamed and grouped in various ways",3 and which thereby tend to disenable an ethos of agonistic respect. And yet, if the purpose of critical political thinking today is, in the terms employed by Gilles Deleuze, "contributing to the invention of a people"4 (rather than "representing" one that already is) then instrumentalizations of a thinker's work are unavoidable, including those motivated by an anti-systemic sensibility.
Seven Resolutions for 2009 Geert Lovink 1. Radical makeover of Indymedia into an irresistible network of networks, aimed to link local initiatives, worldwide, that aim to bring down corporate capitalism. In order to do this Indymedia needs to go beyond the (alternative) news paradigm. This is the time to do it. If not now, when? The debate should be about the possible adaptation, or perhaps transcendence (think negative dialectics) of the social networking approach. Is it enough if we all start to twitter? Perhaps not. A lot of the online conversations at the moment circle around these topics. There is a real momentum building up here, and that's exciting. 2. Renaissance of theory, radical texts that appeal to young people and help them to dream again, aimed to develop critical concepts, cool memes and audio-visual whispers that can feed the collective imagination with new, powerful ideas that are capable to move people into action. Theory, in this context, means speculative philosophies, not academic writing or hermetic bible texts, aimed to exclude outsiders and those with the wrong belief system. Overcoming political correctness in the way that beats populism would be the way to go. 3. Dismantling the academic exclusion machine. With this I mean the hilarious peer review dramas that we see around us everywhere, aimed to reproduce the old boys networks, excluding different voices, discourses and networked research practices. We need to have the civil courage to say no to these suppressive and utterly wrong bureaucratic procedures that, in the end, result in the elimination of quality, creativity and criticism (and, ironically, of innovation, too). In the same way we need to unleash a social movement of those who dare to say no to all these silly copyright contracts that we're forced to sign. We should stop signing away our 'intellectual property' and begin to radicalize and help democratize and popularize the creative commons and floss movements.
Interface: a journal for and about social movements Issue one: "movement knowledge" The first issue of Interface, a multilingual, open access and global e-journal produced by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now available at www.interfacejournal.net. The special theme of this issue is "movement knowledge": what movements know, how they produce knowledge, what they do with it and how it can make a difference.
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