Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 02.26.06 Godard and Gorin's left politics, 1967-1972 by Julia Lesage http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC28folder/GodardGorinPolitics.html from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983, pp. 51-58_copyright Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 1983, 2005 To consider an artist's politics, especially a didactic artist's, raises key issues... [Continue Reading]

Topic(s): US Analysis
Date Posted: 02.24.06

House Passes Cruel Anti-Immigrant Bill

Revolution #030, January 15, 2006, posted at revcom.us

On December 16 the House of Representatives passed a draconian new
bill that, if it becomes law, would further criminalize undocumented
immigrants--along with anyone that helps them--and intensify the
militarization of the border and the overall repressive offensive
against immigrants.

Key features of the House bill include the following:

* Making it a felony crime--instead of a civil violation as it is
now--to be in the U.S. without legal documents. Millions of people now
in the U.S. would be classified as "felons." Immigrants arrested
without papers would be subject to immediate detention and
deportation--and would be permanently ineligible for U.S. citizenship.
* The building of five double-layer border fences--totaling 698
miles--in California and Arizona. This is seen as a "setback" by some
backers of the bill who wanted a fortified fence along the entire
2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
* Making it a federal crime to assist undocumented immigrants.
This would target, for example, people who leave water in the deserts,
trying to save the lives of immigrants who cross the border through
those dangerous areas--where hundreds die each year. Social workers,
doctors and nurses, teachers, priests, and others who give any help or
services to undocumented people could face five years in prison and
have their assets seized by the government.
* Requiring employers to collect and submit Social Security
numbers and other information on each worker to the Department of
Homeland Security to verify their "legal status." The information
would be stored on government databases. The ACLU notes that this
measure would create "a federally mandated requirement for citizens as
well as immigrants to get a permission slip from the federal
government before they can take a job."

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Guantanamo Bay
Date Posted: 02.24.06

When even actors aren't safe
Clive Stafford Smith
Monday 27th February 2006

Rizwan Ahmed was part of a prizewinning team at the Berlin Film Festival. When he got back to Luton Airport, however, he was a terror suspect. By Clive Stafford Smith

When Michael Winterbottom's Road to Guantanamo won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on 19 February, Rizwan Ahmed, one of the stars of the movie, was there. "It was an emotional experience," he told me later. "The film had an amazing reception and on some levels it felt like the Tipton boys had been vindicated."

The Tipton boys, better known as the Tipton Three, are Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, who spent two years in Guantanamo Bay before being released without charge. The film traces their story from their initial trip to Pakistan for Asif's wedding, through Afghanistan and on to the US prison camp. Rizwan - Riz for short - played the part of Shafiq Rasul.

His delight was short-lived, ending abruptly when, with Shafiq and Ruhal, he got back to Luton Airport. "Shafiq was stopped at the immigration desk," Riz said. "Soon after, I was detained and questioned by the Special Branch. A female officer questioned me extensively by the baggage claim, taking notes. When I asked what all these questions were for, she took me to a small room."

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Biopolitics
Date Posted: 02.22.06

The slippage from people, People (or multitude) TO population (thus bio-politics) does not cease. This article is interesting, because it underlines the moves within the US to centralize biological information into the hands of the federal government and to deny that same access to information from people, enabling the state to be the only lawful beneficiary and guardian of our biological heritage/life/death.
-rg

The Life and Death of Public Records
By Terry Allen, In These Times
Posted on February 21, 2006, Printed on February 22, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/32242/

Sometimes it's the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists, lawyers and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution that officials miss or ignore.

In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to create a vast database of vital records to be centralized in Washington and details measures that states must implement -- and pay millions for -- before next year's scheduled implementation.

The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates and, in some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative, and "legitimate" research institutions may be able to access files. But reporters and activists won't be allowed to fish through records, many family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck, and people wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless and need your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no service.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 02.22.06

They just wanted to go home together
By Amira Hass
R. had a work meeting in Ramallah. She planned to return home, to East Jerusalem, with M., her partner, who works in Ramallah. They reached the Hizma checkpoint, east of the Pisgat Ze'ev settlement, where there is a permanent Israel Defense Forces post that checks all travelers heading to Jerusalem. You are forbidden to take this route, said the soldiers. Only your husband is allowed. Take the Qalandiyah checkpoint route
R. and M. have been married for about 10 years. He is a Palestinian, born in East Jerusalem, an Israeli resident. She has an ID card from the territories. She has a permit to be in Jerusalem, at home, with her children and spouse.
As soon as they were married they applied to the Israeli Interior Ministry for "family unification." Despite promises, including written promises, she is still waiting for the residency document. They've been through a lot of Kafkaesque travails as a result, but the new prohibition against going home together shocked even them. They thought it might have been a soldier's whim, but a news item in Haaretz last Friday made clear to them that it is a military order, signed by Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh, commander of the IDF in the Judea and Samaria region. The order forbids Palestinians from entering Israel via any route other than 11 special crossings that were allocated only to them - and they can only cross those on foot. Palestinians are not allowed to drive inside Israel. The order also prohibits Israelis from bringing Palestinians into Israel through passages designated for Israelis only.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): 
Date Posted: 02.21.06

Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life
Territories/Islands
An earlier version of this paper by Tom Keenan was given in February 2005 at a conference in honor of Jacques Derrida jointly organized by Peter Goodrich of the Cardozo Law School and Anselm Haverkamp of New York University.

Drift: Politics and the Simulation of Real Life

THOMAS KEENAN

For Jacques Derrida

But here is yet one more turn, and it is political: is it not also democracy that gives the right to irony in the public space? Yes, for democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone (Wechsel der Töne), to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on. And, thus, to a certain nonpublic public within the public, to a res publica, a republic where the difference between the public and the nonpublic remains an undecidable limit. —Jacques Derrida, Voyous

In his discussion of the “felicity conditions” of the performative utterance, J.L. Austin provides an amusing and unforgettable moment when he introduces the “low type.”[1] He has been explaining that performatives—making promises, christening ships, opening meetings or conferences—are to be judged not by their truth or falsity or their correspondence with reality but simply by their success or failure, because what matters most about performatives is whether or not they take place. How they happen, though, or what else needs to be in place in order for them to take place, is the question. “When I say ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening,” writes Austin.[2] What matters is that the thing gets done, and events like this have a chance of succeeding only if their corresponding speech acts are performed properly— that is to say, by the right person, addressed to the right object, using the right words, uttered at the right time and place. The power does not reside simply in the words themselves, however necessary the words are. They are not magic words or incantations; they are contextually bound formulas. So they cannot be repeated out of context, or by the wrong person, and have any chance of working. Context, which precedes the utterance, conditions its success or failure.

For instance, imagine all the dignitaries are lined up at the shipyard for the christening of that new ship. “You have been appointed to name it,” Austin writes. You’ve learned the correct formula, the bottle of champagne is in your hands, and you’re right on the verge of smashing it across the bow as you utter the words that give the ship its name. “But,” imagines Austin, “at that very moment some low type comes up, snatches the bottle out of your hand, breaks it on the stem, shouts out ‘I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin,’ and then for good measure kicks away the chocks.” Needless to say, says Austin, “We agree that the ship certainly isn’t now named the Generalissimo Stalin, and we agree that it’s an infernal shame and so on and so forth.”[3] The interruption may have been rude, disruptive, and irritating, but Austin does not think it is dangerous. It requires no policing. There is no doubt that the ship did not get named. As Derrida has pointed out, Austin insists that the mere repetition of the formula, even “a perfectly legitimate and agreed procedure,” has no effect whatsoever when it “has been invoked in the wrong circumstances, namely by the wrong person, this low type instead of the person appointed to do it.”[4] That, in fact, is the point of the story, to underline the nonnegotiable character of “circumstances” or context and to disqualify mimicry, representation, or repetition of the performative phrase.[5] The context automates the protective or policing function because it comes first. Thus Austin can analyze the failure further: “we might look at it differently and say that this is a case where the procedure has not as a whole been gone through correctly, because part of the procedure for naming a ship is that you should first of all get yourself appointed as the person to do the naming and that’s what this fellow did not do.”[6]

So, unappointed, the low type and his and her attempted takeover—a sort of hijacking, however peaceful—of the ceremony are destined, by definition, to failure. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin (taking the place of the low type) explains that “my ‘action’ was ‘void’ or ‘without effect,’ because I was not a proper person, had not the ‘capacity’ to perform it”; in other words, given the context, which is to say the pre-given identity of the speaker, it never had a chance. The “action” was empty precisely insofar as it was a “mockery.”7 Austin’s analysis of the performative utterance structurally isolates the context from the utterances within it. Context precedes and governs, enables and disables, those speech acts—from a seemingly unreachable distance. And the circumstances have the force of law.[8]

Austin quickly abandons the story of the low type and does not pursue his or her fate, because there is no need to do so. In a very real sense the speech of the low type, “not a proper person,” does not take place: it is unheard, even unhearable; it barely counts as speech. It is noise, a disturbance, a “misfire” barely distinguishable from a backfire, effectively unrecognizable as a speech act at all ... a kind of “lowing,” we might say. In the summer of 1989, just as the question metonymized by Stalin was finally fading from the geopolitical stage, the matter of a performative, now biopolitical, again arose.[9]

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Palestine / Israel
Date Posted: 02.21.06

The Architecture of Ariel Sharon
When he has left the political arena, Sharon’s legacy needs not be written into books and albums as it is already written large into the spaces of the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Whether in the military or in politics, times when Sharon is in power were always characterized by the construction frenzies that decisively shaped the physical realities in which both Israelis and Palestinians struggle to live. Significantly, Sharon was rarely photographed without a map rolled under his armpit. His influence on the transformation of the environment of the occupied territories is so great that, after Ben Gurion, who masterminded the formation and planning of the young state, he would no doubt be referred to as the Israel’s second architect. For Sharon the architect/general war is politics and politics is space making. As every architect knows well, space making involves both placing and clearing; construction and destruction. And thus, what follows could be read as a review of Sharon’s spatial oeuvre, as one architect reviews the work of another.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Guantanamo Bay
Date Posted: 02.21.06 http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/16_02_06_un_guantanamo.pdf... [Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Lenin
Date Posted: 02.12.06

REPEATING LENIN

Slavoj Zizek

Lenin's Choice

The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: Marx is OK, even on Wall Street, there are people who love him today - Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamics, Marx of the Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives -, but Lenin, no, you can't be serious! The working class movement, revolutionary Party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn't Lenin stand precisely for the FAILURE to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire XXth century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in the contemporary academic politics, the idea to deal with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought... however, one should treat Lenin in an "objective critical and scientific way," not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights - therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the XXth century totalitarianisms.

[Continue Reading]

Topic(s): Resistance?
Date Posted: 02.07.06

hi - an interview we just translated into english - with italian
chainworkers - on (social) precarity, innovative direct action,
bio-unionism, mayday, and so on... - next 17-19 april there is an european
meeting for the euromayday network, in milan -

just to give you a glimpse on what's going on at this side on political
imagination+creativity :)

-----

> From labor precarity to social precarity [1]
>
Chainworkers interviewed by María Cecilia Fernández

The workers' movement of the nineteenth century was organized around the
factory by means of the union, but, at the same time, it created „societies
of resistence,‰ spaces of social gathering and mutual support. Capitalist
production was understood not only as an economic problem but as a social
problem as well. The struggle against capitalism signified a struggle
against mercantile forms of life, beyond unionization and worker's rights.

Presently, the capitalist process of producing surplus value has
incorporated as a force of labor the cognitive, comunicative, and affective
capacities of human beings. One of the most dynamic dimensions of social
production is a type of inmaterial work force. Computer technicians, web
designers, workers in advertising, artists and publicists are part of the
present social composition of labor. In post-Fordist production, the new
forms of labor have raised the question of which forms of social
organization will confront the situation of flexibility, mobility and labor
precarity, as well as the forms of life of capitalist social relations.

[Continue Reading]