Hoipolloi Cassidy writes:

"French Fries"

Hoipolloi Cassidy, Woid

At least the New York Times got it right: the French are pervs. Of course this has been the American view for ages, ever since those nineteenth-century tales of caution in which innocent 'Murican farm-boys end up in Europe, only to be seduced by women, wine, and fabulous health benefits.

That's been the unanimous response of that sector of the American Right that passes for a center. The Times has been popping with outrage about the selfishness of those French voters who overwhelmingly rejected the proposed European Constitution last week — even one of its art critics joined in. The gist was, that the French are so selfish they insist on working only thirty-five hours in the week but that'll learn them when some day they're overwhelmed by Screaming Yellow Hordes willing to work thirty-five hours a day, eventually. Bad enough that French people actually enjoy sex: now they want satisfaction on the job as well. Instead of the race to the bottom promised by neo-liberalism they demand a race to the top. Garçon! Champagne!

T.M. Down writes:

"Selective Selling of Ideas in the U.S."

T. M. Down

If anything can be said about the prevailing culture in the United States, it is that commodities infiltrate every aspect of life. Indeed, Americans identify themselves most by those commodities they consume: music, cars, clothing, food, jewelry.

Although popularly characterized as the fleeting attribute of a youthful search for identity, such behavior still carries well into adulthood, and represents the core of identity by which most Americans define themselves. Commodities are so essential to identity in the United States, in fact, that mere ideas and beliefs have been transformed into commodities — traded, branded, sold and sanctioned.

In the United States, nothing is too sacred to be sold: from morality and religion to political ideology and patriotism, all are conveniently pre-packaged for consumption, stamped on T-shirts, bumper stickers and commercial advertisements conveniently disguised as news; that is, at least, those commodities that the establishment wishes to sell.

"The Philosopher and the Ayatollah"

Wesley Yang

In 1978, Michel Foucault went to Iran as a novice
journalist to report on the unfolding revolution. His
dispatches — now fully available in translation — shed
some light on the illusions of intellectuals in our
own time.

"It is perhaps the first great insurrection against
global systems, the form of revolt that is the most
modern and most insane." With these words, the French
philosopher Michel Foucault hailed the rising tide
that would sweep Iran's modernizing despot, Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi Shah, out of power in January 1979 and
install in his place one of the world's most illiberal
regimes, the Shi'ite government headed by Ayatollah
Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini.

Foucault wasn't just pontificating from an armchair in
Paris. In the fall of 1978, as the shah's government
tottered, he made two trips to Iran as a "mere novice"
reporter, as he put it, to watch events unfold. "We
have to be there at the birth of ideas," he explained
in an interview with an Iranian journalist, "the
bursting outward of their force; not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting this force,
in struggle carried on around ideas, for or against
them."

While many liberals and leftists supported the
populist uprising that pitted unarmed masses against
one of the world's best-armed regimes, none welcomed
the announcement of the growing power of radical Islam
with the portentous lyricism that Foucault brought to
his brief, and never repeated, foray into journalism.

Nine Minutes in the Yard:
A conversation with Harun Farocki
by Rembert Hüser
Senses of Cinema

This interview took place in Berlin on July 25th, 1999.

Rembert Hüser: In the film-installation you showed recently at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000), the dead prison convict, William Martinez, is lying in the yard for nine minutes before he is taken away. Everything follows a precise choreography.

Harun Farocki: I'm sure you are using the term 'choreography' because the yard resembles a stage. Guards, ready to shoot, have their guns trained on Martinez; a camera is lying in wait for an incident worth recording. Martinez is an inmate of a high security prison in Corcoran, California. He starts a fight with another inmate and is shot down. The surveillance video is silent. You see the white smoke from the shot glide through the frame. Then it takes nine minutes before Martinez is taken away on a stretcher. Allegedly the yard has to be cleared for security reasons, which takes some time. Though the event looks very different from a movie, it gives the impression that it has to take place and could only occur in this staged, dramatic way; it looks predestined.

stevphen writes: This is one of two texts that will appear early next year in a volume Ian is editing, called Deleuze and the Contemporary World.

"The Axiomatic, or, The Seven Givens of the Contemporary World"
Ian Buchanan

"It is the real characteristics of axiomatics that lead us to say that capitalism and present-day politics are an axiomatic in the literal sense.} — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze says that you can never know a philosopher properly until to you know what he or she is against. To know them at all, you have to know what puts fire in their soul, what makes them take up the nearly impossible challenge of trying to say anything at all. Too many people are content to say Deleuze, like Nietzsche, was against Hegel without ever asking why. And those who do trouble themselves to ask this question are too often satisfied with a merely philosophical answer.

But if Deleuze found Hegel’s philosophy intolerable it was not simply because he thought that the dialectic was a badly made concept, or that he objected to a metaphysics predicated on negation. These are the complaints of a sandbox philosopher and Deleuze was certainly not that. Hegel’s philosophy was intolerable to Deleuze because in his eyes it offers a slave’s view of the world. Worse, it is a model of thought that seems to participate in the legitimation of the very system that enslaves us by installing the master-slave dialectic at the centre our ratiocination, making it seem like this is the only choice we have, effectively denying us in advance the option of asking our own questions and forming our own problematics. But this critique is only meaningful (i.e., authentically critical) to the extent that it is read in terms of their conception of philosophy’s purpose, which is precisely Marxian to the extent that, like Marx, they hold that the point of philosophy is not simply to understand society, but to change it.

Comrade Freeman writes:
"
The Absurd Hero & The Ruthless Critic

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but
exhaust the limits of the possible.”
-Pindar, Pythian three

Albert Camus is regarded as the premier illumination of the philosophy known as Absurdism, which is often considered a pessimistic version of Existentialism and sometimes the division is not even recognised. The optimistic existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was a friend of Camus, the two met during the Nazi occupation of France in the resistance movement. Camus during this period wrote on two of his major works “The Stranger “and “The Myth of Sysiphysus” while working along side the likes of André Malraux and Jacques Baumel on “combat” a famous resistance newspaper. After the war Sartre and Camus were both considered celebrities of the French intellectual scene. Camus a member of Sartre’s entourage wished to strikeout an independence so as not to be seen as a younger Sartre. This volition leads Camus to create “L'Homme révolté” or as normally translated into English “The Rebel” in 1951, a book size essay which deals with rebellion as an affirmation and search for order and unity in the face of absurdity. Through this piece the current author will firstly give the reader an insight into the philosophy of Albert Camus and then give an analysis of Camus’s comments on Karl Marx in “the rebel”.

Comrade Freeman writes:

"The Philosophy of Leo Strauss:
Oligarchs with Myths"
Comrade Freeman

Leo Strauss was born in Germany during the last year of the 19th century, where he studied philosophy, natural science and mathematics. By 1932 though he left his native country and gained a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship through the personal recommendation of the Nazi legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Eventually Strauss made his way to the United States of America where he gained work as political philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research, and then, the University of Chicago.

Through Strauss’s years of teaching at these institutions he gained a following of devoted students who became in turn teachers and implementers of his political philosophy. Through this essay we will analyse the influences on Leo Strauss and what came to be the political philosophy he supported. Furthermore we will look at the influence Strauss philosophy is having on world politics through its influence on the American consciousness.

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Tenth Anniversary of the First Netstrike"

Alessandro Ludovico, Springerin

You won't find many references to Tommaso Tozzi in international media art
sources. You won't find him in Wikipedia (yet), nor in MIT Press books or
Ars Electronica catalogues. Nevertheless, this Italian artist and theorist
is the inventor of one of the key online protest tools. Ten years ago he
conceived and realized the first "netstrike" (network strike) on the
Internet. It took place during the international protest against the French
atomic test at the Mururoa Atoll in Polynesia.

"Sharing Music: Property Gone Wild"
Michael Neumann, Counterpunch

No one is so naive as to think there's something intellectual or creative about 'intellectual property rights'. They protect even the worst Britney Spears wannabe from Britney-Spears-wannabe wannabes. Music company lawyers may talk about protecting an 'artist's works' against debasement or corruption, but the 'protection' of intellectual property is also a licence to debase and corrupt. For those who don't posses them, intellectual property rights do indeed protect the 'works' against debasement, or for that matter ennoblement. Those that do possess the rights to a work - not necessarily the artists themselves - can debase and corrupt it as much as they like. I'm pretty sure I've heard a composition by Little Walter, one of the three or four true giants of the blues, used to advertise tampons. Whoever came up with that had no doubt intellectual property in the music. On the other hand, the composition techniques central to classic blues, which involve extensive borrowing from others, now count as piratical. Today, Robert Johnson or Blind Lemon Jefferson would be looking at fines or lawsuits for their work.

DN writes:

Strangers Everywhere:
Anarchists Arrested in Italy

About some anarchists arrested in Lecce and a world where no one can feel at home

On Thursday, May 12, in a massive show of force, the Digos (Italian political police) arrested five anarchists in Lecce, Italy. The arrested are Annalisa Capone, Angela Marina Ferrari (Marina), Cristian Palladini, Salvatore Signore and Saverio Pellegrino.

The police show of force in this situation could appear absurd. In operation “nighttime”, as the cops termed this series of raids, searches and arrests, one hundred and fifty cops were deployed in the region of Lecce alone. These included canine units, border cops, postal cops, units from the Central Antiterrorism service, bomb specialists, a helicopter and so on.