Pitying Paul Virillio

NOT BORED!

It isn’t particularly easy to read Paul Virilio’s books. He writes in French, and it is difficult to translate his idiosyncratic puns, metaphors and neologisms into English. He doesn’t really write books, though he has certainly published a great many texts. Virilio mainly writes articles and essays; he reads aloud papers he’s written at conferences; and he gives in-depth interviews. Various collections of these furtive texts have been assembled and published as “books” that are often very short and, in the English translations, not illustrated. Finally, Virilio tends to develop his themes slowly, across the span of several “books,” which makes it especially difficult for the newcomer to enter into his discourse, which dates back to the late 1970s (he was born in 1932). But Virilio needs to be read. He is the only post-World War II radical French theorist to write extensively on the inter-related subjects of war, the military, speed, and the acceleration of time, and his writings are uniquely useful in describing and theorizing “terrorism,” militarism, and September 11th.

Most recently, there’s this weird “book” called Art and Fear (Continuum, London/New York, 2003). Composed of two short texts, “A Pitiless Art” and “Silence on Trial,” and only 61 pages long, it was originally published in 2000 by Editions Galilee under the title La Procedure Silence (“The Silence Trial”). In 2002, the book was translated into English by Julie Rose, who had previously translated Virilio’s The Art of the Motor (University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Slender as it is – no price listed, but my copy cost an unmerciful $15 – this volume is also absurdly padded out. Not only does it contain a two-page-long translator’s preface, a bibliography of works cited and an index, but also a completely unnecessary thirteen-page-long “introduction” by John Armitage, who is clearly uncomfortable with the book itself or this particular line of thought in Virilio’s books. And so Armitage feels compelled to offer various defensive responses to what “commentators” on the book “might claim” about it. When all is said and done, Art and Fear contains a mere 35 pages of worthwhile material. But this material is so strong and provocative that it is more than worth the difficulty of obtaining it.

kolya abramsky writes:

The Underground Challenge:
Raw Materials, Energy, the World-Economy and Anti-Capitalism

Kolya Abramsky

[This review will appear shortly in Anarchist Perspectives.]

A review of:

Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age
By Bruce Podobnik
(Temple University Press, Philadelphia. 2006),

and

Globalization and the Race for Resources
By Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell
(John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. 2005)

Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age by Bruce Podobnik, and Globalization and the Race for Resources by Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell are two incredibly timely, highly informed and analytically sharp analyses of both raw materials and energy, within a wider, and importantly, long-term analysis of the capitalist world-system as a whole and the conflicts, hierarchies and inequalities that are inherent to its functioning.

From the oil workers of Iraq, to the wood-fuelled kitchens of India, to the stranded in New Orleans, to Black communities of Colombia, to the gas fields of Bolivia, and the electricity consumers in Soweto, to the displaced millions of Narmada and Three Gorges, to the unregulated Chinese coal miners dying in explosions, to the Native Americans whose reproductive health is threatened by uranium extraction in Shoshone, to the iron mines of the Amazon. Increasingly, raw materials and energy are becoming important sites of conflict, and in all likelihood, such trends will continue to intensify in the near future. They are conflicts in which the artificialness and futility of attempting to separate analysis of local, regional, national and global dynamics from one another becomes glaringly obvious. Control of raw materials and energy is a crucial precondition to capitalist production and reproduction.

Anonymous Comrade writes Review of Woodsquat

(West Coast Line 37/2-3)


by Tom Sandborn

“The laws, in their infinite majesty, forbid both the rich and the poor to sleep beneath the bridges of Paris,” observed a sardonic French writer during the 19th century. Not too much has changed in the intervening years. Capitalism still creates agonizing poverty at the bottom, excess wealth at the top, and a “justice” system designed to keep the aromatic, unsightly poor from bothering their social betters.


Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood has served, almost since the beginning of European settlement here in the rain forest, as a holding pen for surplus labour and the marginalized poor who have fallen into capitalism’s spare parts bin. The neighborhood is, famously, Canada’s poorest and the home of one of the country’s largest concentrations of off-reserve native settlements.

"Open Source Projects as Voluntary Hierarchies"

Felix Stalder

Reviewing Stephen Weber, The Success of Open Source.
(2004) Cambridge, MA,
Harvard UP

ISBN: 0-674-01292-5, pp. 311

Over the last half-decade, free and open source software (FOSS) has
moved from
the hacker margins to the mainstream. Corporations, large and
small, have
invested in it, some governments are actively supporting it and it is
becoming an increasingly important tool for the building of an
international
civil society. In the social sciences, the field is receiving a
growing share
of attention, evidenced by a widening stream of research output.
The central
repository for relevant papers, opensource.mit.edu, lists some 250
researchers with a self-declared interest in all things FOSS and
almost as
many scholarly papers, contributed in just five years.
Additionally, there
are several volumes written by activists, book-length treatments by
journalists, plus biographies of the two most prominent figures,
Richard
Stallman and Linus Torvalds.