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"Fear and Loathing in Globalization"
Fredric Jameson, New Left Review
Reviewing William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Has the author of Neuromancer
really ‘changed his style’? Has he even ‘stopped’ writing Science Fiction, as some old-fashioned critics have put it, thinking thereby to pay him a compliment? Maybe, on the contrary, he is moving closer to the ‘cyberpunk’ with which he is often associated, but which seems more characteristically developed in the work of his sometime collaborator Bruce Sterling. In any case, the representational apparatus of Science Fiction, having gone through innumerable generations of technological development and well-nigh viral mutation since the onset of that movement, is sending back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either).
jim writes:
"Notes on the Politics of Software Culture"
Andreas Broeckmann
[written for the Next5Minutes4 reader; first posted on Nettime]
Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as
a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be
studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on
software for their execution -- from systems of e-government and
net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation
of social groups and movements --, it is necessary to understand the
procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the
cultural and political 'rules' coded into them. The 'killer apps' of
tomorrow may, as Howard Rheingold claims, not be 'hardware devices or
software programs but social practices'. Yet, these social practices
will increasingly be determined by software configurations of the
available infrastructure and the degrees and types of latitude that
they offer.
Anonymous Comrade submits:
"One-to-One Words of a Blacklistee"
Bruce Weber, NY Times, Sept. 5, 2003
Even beyond the sonorous trochees that make it stick in the mind like a musical phrase, Dalton Trumbo is a memorable name in Hollywood. You can still see it on the screen a lot. Trumbo, who died in 1976, was a prolific screenwriter whose 50 or so film credits included "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," "Lonely Are the Brave," "Spartacus," "Exodus," "Papillon," "The Fixer," "The Sandpiper," "Hawaii" and "Johnny Got His Gun," which he adapted and directed from his own antiwar novel. And of course he was a leading member of the Hollywood 10, a group of writers, producers and directors who, after appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington in 1947, were branded as Communist sympathizers and blacklisted by the studios.
primativa writes:
For Review: A New Alphabet
Digital version of a book: A New Alphabet-Language, Icons and Embodiment at http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~jdean is a multi-facetted inquiry into new media, digital literacy, the aesthetics of data base and embodiment in an alphabet book format using visual art, collage, essay and poetry.
"Where the Twain Should Have Met"
A Review of Edward Said's Orientalism,
Christopher Hitchens
The cosmopolitan Edward Said was ideally placed to explain East to West and West to East. What went wrong?
I first met Edward Said in the summer of 1976, in the capital city of Cyprus. We had come to Nicosia to take part in a conference on the rights of small nations. The obscene civil war in Lebanon was just beginning to consume the whole society and to destroy the cosmopolitanism of Beirut; it was still just possible in those days to imagine that a right "side" could be discerned through the smoke of confessional conflagration.
Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation was in its infancy (as was the messianic "settler" movement among Jews), and the occupation itself was less than a decade old. Egypt was still the Egypt of Anwar Sadat — a man who had placed most of his credit on the wager of "Westernization," however commercially conceived, and who was only two years away from the Camp David accords. It was becoming dimly apprehended in the West that the old narrative of "Israel" versus "the Arabs" was much too crude. The image of a frugal kibbutz state surrounded by a heaving ocean of ravening mullahs and demagogues was slowly yielding to a story of two peoples contesting a right to the same twice-promised land.
"The Triumph of Exegesis over Praxis and History"
Marvin E. Gettleman
A Review of Gramsci and Education,
Carmel Borg, Joseph Buttigieg, and Peter Mayo, eds. Culture and Politics Series. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. ii + 335 pp. Notes. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7425-0032-2; $34.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7425-0033-0.
Marvin E. Gettleman is Emeritus Professor of History, Brooklyn Polytechnic University.
This review was first published by H-Education (July, 2003)
The fifteen essays comprising this book have been written mainly by radical educational scholars from seven countries in Europe and the Americas. The book's editors (who also contribute essays) hail from Notre Dame University in the United States and the University of Malta. Their common aim is to explicate the educational views of the Italian Communist scholar-activist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and to link his teachings to present-day political and pedagogical issues. Most of Gramsci's writings on education consist of fragments (Quaderni del carcere) written during his decade-long confinement in a fascist prison. There is inevitable overlap and duplication in many of the essays in Gramsci and Education.
Anonymous Kumquat submits:
"Creative Activism"
Ammiel Alcalay, Al Ahram
The Third International Black Panther Film Festival provided a rare opportunity for politics and imagination to intermingle.
Much of the global media's attention on the anti-war movement and dissent in the United States has focussed on a very small range of opinion and experience, usually discussing whether or not American citizens support or do not support the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq, or how people feel about the erosion of what are generally called civil liberties. Much less attention gets paid to the core of long-time activists, former or current political prisoners, and younger grass-roots community activists for whom things like US Middle East policies and the introduction of the Patriot Act are simply extensions, expansions and continuities of long standing issues that continue to disenfranchise poor, working class, and largely black and Latino communities.
Anonymous Kumquat submits:
"A Study in
Floccinaucinihilipilification"
Bob Black
Murray Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism was an
apocalyptic, and apoplectic, polemic against post-leftist forms of
anarchism. So closely did it approach self-parody that it escaped
suspicion on that score only because of the certain fact that Bookchin has
no sense of humor. No such certainty attaches to "Nihilism U.S.A.
McAnarchy in the Playpen" by someone calling himself Timothy Balash.
A shapeless knockoff of SALA, NUSA will find few beginning-to-end readers
except those engaging in an egoscan – fandom jargon for skimming a zine
looking for your own name. No one has ever heard of Balash, which is
probably the pseudonym of someone whose real name, if known, would be a
source of discredit, like Bill Brown or Stewart Home. But if NUSA is a
debut effort, it is indeed a Titanic one: sunk on its maiden voyage.
The Politics of Language
Like George Orwell and Theodor Adorno, I believe there is a
relationship (but not, of course, a one-to-one relationship) between good
writing and true writing. For me to say so is, I admit, self-serving, but
what do you expect from a convicted Stirnerist? If there is any truth to
this proposition, then there is hardly any truth to NUSA. To read it is to
experience genuine suffering. Every known violation of the English
language is well represented, as well as abominations so singular as to
be, as H.P. Lovecraft might say, unnamable. There are nonexistent words:
"abolishment," "exploitive," "rompish,"
"busking," "meritous." Mixed metaphors are the norm.
In the very first sentence, anarchism, "a dizzying banquet,"
"has failed to make itself heard." By not burping? In this
rompish, busking, but not very meritous vision, one might be "crushed
between, on one side, a dress rehearsal" and – well, what
difference does it make what’s on the other side? Then there is the
"collage of mirrors" and the "cable-fed cloisters."
Necessary words are omitted – "comes [ ] a little surprise"
– the reader soon wishes for more of this particular mistake.
Disagreement of subject and verb is nearly normative. "Many a hippy .
. . missed most of their opportunities"; "Lest the reader . . .
suspect they are beginning to detect"; "Fetishization . . . are
as cliched and commonplace as" (whatever); and then there’s
"the runaway phenomena of the single (and usually impoverished
female) parent."
jim submits:
"Yes, Orwell Matters — But Does Christopher Hitchens?"
Bill Weinberg Reviews Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters
Basic Books, New York, 2002, 211 pp., $24
(Published in the UK as Orwell’s Victory, Penguin, London, 2002)
Here is a little exercise in historical ironies.
Few seem to remember it now, but in the 1980s, forgotten little Nicaragua
was one of the last front-lines of the Cold War. When I was there in
those years, one of many idealistic gringos who came to witness the
besieged revolution, the right-wing opposition was distributing a Spanish
translation of a classic parable of revolution betrayed. This was a
probable element of the CIA "psychological operations" campaign aimed at
subverting the revolutionary Sandinista regime, which also included
distribution of the notorious "dirty tricks" manual advocating sabotage
and assassination. The regime responded by denouncing the parable as a
counter-revolutionary polemic written by a reactionary pro-imperialist
writer. The work, of course, was Animal Farm by George Orwell.
hydrarchist submits: "Ashwin Desai
teaches at the Workers College in Durban, South Africa, and is a
newspaper columnist and community activist. His most recent book is
We Are the Poors: Community Struggles in
Post-Apartheid South Africa (Monthly Review Press, 2002)."
"Struggles Against Privatization in South Africa"
Ashwin Desai
Inside the Transition
An aspect of the transition from apartheid to democracy in South Africa was
inadvertently captured at the opening of the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting
held at the International Convention Centre in Durban, in June 2002, as the
police arrived with a massive show of force and drove protesters away from the
building with batons and charging horses. One of the organizers of the WEF was
approached by an incredulous member of the foreign media and asked about the
right to protest in the “new South Africa.” The organizer pulled out
the program and, with a wry smile, pointed to an upcoming session entitled
“Taking NEPAD to the People.” He said he could not understand the
protests because the “people” have been accommodated.
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