Anonymous Comrade writes "NEURO -- networking europe

From February 27.-29, 2004 the second version of the makeworlds festival will take place in Muffathalle, Munich (DE). A new generation of media and network initiatives from all over Europe and different parts of the world present and work on their projects in a broad interactive framework that explores the different conceptual and practical idioms used to articulate and create new social, political and artistic practices. Originating within the networking culture of open communications and free exchange the event aims to connect contemporary debates on mobility, migration and social movements with new media instruments, information and communication technologies. NEURO will be a major opportunity for forming creative alliances - within a coherent discursive field - between all those that share the aspiration to raise theory and activity to a level adequate to the practice of digital generations.

John Duda writes:

"Instincts and Institutions"

Gilles Deleuze

[Originally published in 1955, and collected in "L'Ile Desert".

Translation by John Duda, 2003.]

That which one calls an instinct, and that which one calls an
institution, essentially designate processes of satisfaction.

On the
one hand, the organism, in reacting to external stimuli naturally,
pulls from the exterior world the elements of a satisfaction of its
tendencies and its needs; these elements form, for different animals,
specific worlds. On the other hand, the subject, in instituting an
original world between its tendencies and the exterior
environment [milieu], elaborates artificial means of satisfaction,
which in submitting it to something else liberate the organism from
nature, and which in introducing it into a new environment transform
the tendency itself; it is true that money liberates one from hunger
-- on the condition that one has some, and that marriage spares one
the search for a partner -- through submission to other tasks.

This
is to say that all individual experience supposes, as an a
priori, the preexistence of an environment in which the experience is
conducted [mennée], an environment of specificity [mileu
spécifique] or an institutional environment. Instinct and
institution are the two organized forms of a possible satisfaction.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Toward Post-Modern Anarchism"

L. Gambone

Modernity and Post-Modernity (1)

In order to understand the importance of Post
Modernity, (hereafter abbreviated as PM) we must
first understand what is meant by Modernity. In terms
of thought or underlying philosophy, Modernity means
the abstract universalism of Enlightenment
Rationalism.(2) Economically, it means Industrialism.
Socially, mass society, the decline of organized
religion and the rise of nihilism and secular
religions (ideologies) like Nationalism, Communism and
Fascism. Local, particular beliefs, customs,
economies, forms of government and mutual aid are
pushed aside by universalized belief systems and
national organizations. Abstract universals manifest
themselves in such collective forms as the Nation
State and the multi- national business corporation.
The bureaucrat is the personification of Modernity,
the Corporate State or State Capitalism its ultimate
political-economic form. State socialism, fascism,
social democracy and corporate liberalism, though
differing in the level of repression, have similar
results -- the destruction of individual freedom and
the growth of bureaucracy.

"Derrida's Deconstruction of Authority"

Saul Newman

The political aspect of Jacques Derrida's thinking, in particular his critique of authority, has been somewhat neglected. However his interrogation of rational and essentialist structures in philosophy makes his work crucial to any contemporary critique of political institutions and discourses, and indeed any understanding of radical politics.

Derrida instigates a series of strategies or 'moves' to unmask the suppressed antagonisms and differences within the Western philosophical discourse whose claims to universality, wholeness and lucid self-reflection have been sounded since the time of Plato. His critique has important implications for political theory: his questioning of the claims of philosophy may be applied to the claims of political institutions founded upon them.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

Roundtable Discussion on Multitudes

New York City, December 5th, 2-5pm, free

Current debates within radical political thought have
once again returned to the question of the
revolutionary subject. Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri’s provocative claim in Empire that the
Spinozist concept of the multitude best describes the
agent of revolutionary change in today’s society has
become a central topic of discussion within Left
political movements and has engendered a series of
recent interventions by such notable political
theorists as Slavoj Zizek, Alex Callinicos, Ernesto
Laclau, Jacques Ranciere and Alain Badiou. They have
contrasted the concept of multitude to the concepts of
class and the people have framed the division in terms
of St. Francis versus St. Paul, idealism versus
materialism, and ontology versus event.

"The Devil's Accountant"

Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Tim Adams

London Sunday Observer, November 30, 2003

On the railings outside my local train station at Harringay, in north London, someone has carefully placed a series of small white stickers. The stickers, all at eye level, are designed, I suppose, to be the first thing you see on the way to work and the last thing you see on your way home. They are all neatly typed with two words: READ CHOMSKY. Most mornings I find myself wondering for an instant whether the words are an imperative ('If you do nothing else today...'), or a swaggering boast (along the lines of some of the station's other typical graffiti: 'Shagged Karen', say).
Anyone who has read Noam Chomsky will know that both interpretations are justified.

An anonymous coward writes:

"The Heroes of Hell"
Mike Davis Talks with Jon Wiener
Radical History Review 85(2003), 227-237

Jon Wiener: I've heard through the grapevine that you are working on a book about terrorism.

Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932.

Anonymous Comrade writes:

"From the Dangerous Classes to the Danger of the Multitude"
Toni Negri

The "corsi e ricorsi" of history are strange. It is renowned that throughout the history of capitalism the definition of ‘dangerous classes’ has been very flexible.

In the era of manufacture the poor were the dangerous: the multitude of penniless and vagabonds agricultural workers and landless peasants forced to move towards cities and factories. In the era of large industry, the workers became the ‘dangerous class’: assembled en masse in the factory, they exercised a pressure that affected all social relations; the dangerous class had to be pushed on the path of poverty, unemployment, and the industrial reserve army.

Today the poor is the enemy once again: in Postfordism, the flexible worker -- mobile and precarious, capable of producing cognitive and intellectual surplus -- is the enemy, threatened by means of exclusion, as if poverty was not enough. Precarious middle classes, taylorised intellectual labour and an immaterial labour force degraded through industrial instrumentalisation and the alienation of value: this is the fate of the new condition of poverty.

"Postanarchism in a Nutshell"

Jason Adams

In the past couple of years there has been a growing
interest in what some have begun calling
"postanarchism" for short; because it is used to
describe a very diverse body of thought and because of
its perhaps unwarranted temporal implications, even
for those within this milieu, it is a term that is
more often than not used with a great deal of
reticence. But as a term, it is also one which refers
to a wave of attempts to try to reinvent anarchism in
light of major developments within contemporary
radical theory and within the world at large, much of
which ultimately began with the Events of May 1968 in
Paris, France and the intellectual milieu out of which
the insurrection emerged.

"What's Wrong With Postanarchism?"

Jesse Cohn and Shawn Wilbur

What is now being called 'postanarchism' by some
thinkers, including Saul Newman, can take on many
forms, but the term generally refers to an attempt to
marry the best aspects of poststructuralist philosophy
and the anarchist tradition. One way to read the word,
thus, is as a composite: poststructuralism and
anarchism. However, the term also suggests that the
post- prefix applies to its new object as
well, implying that anarchism, at least as heretofore
thought and practiced, is somehow obsolete.

Together,
these two senses of the word form a narrative: an
aging, spent force (anarchism) is to be saved from
obsolescence and irrelevance by being fused with a
fresh, vital force (poststructuralism). We would like
to question this narrative's assumptions and
teleology, but not without some appreciation of what
it has to offer.