Deleuzian Politics? a RounDtable Discussion

Éric Alliez, Claire Colebrook, Peter Hallward, Nicholas Thoburn, Jeremy Gilbert (chair)

Nick and Jeremy circulated some general questions to think about before the discussion, which particularly focused on the surprising fact that many casual commentators, and indeed, some self-styled ‘Deleuzians’, seemed to regard Deleuzian philosophy as wholly compatible with an embrace of market capitalism and its tendency to celebrate the ephemeral, the individual, the hyper-mobile, the infantile; while others seemed to think of Deleuze as a wholly apolitical or even anti-political thinker, mired in Nietzschean aristocratic elitism, ineffectual mysticism, or old-fashioned individualism. As such, the first question touched on the relationship of Deleuze and Guattari to Marx.
VIRTUAL MARXISM?
Jeremy: So - our first question. One of the big questions we want to discuss is ‘what do we make of Manuel DeLanda’s assessment that Marxism is Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “little Oedipus”?’ Nick - you don’t agree with that, I think.
Nick: There are interesting questions about why Deleuze and Guattari declare themselves to be Marxists: it’s not straightforward, and I think this declaration has a number of functions in their work. Some of these would seem to amount to a deliberate provocation in the face of neoliberal consensus, ‘Marx’ being a contentious name to invoke at what was a time of general unpopularity for Marxism. But it is very clear to me that the relationship to Marxism is a point of creative tension, an opening, a disruption in their work rather than a limiting, ‘Oedipal’ factor (which is DeLanda’s claim). So I see their Marxism as dynamic - a kind of ‘virtual Marx’, as Éric has put it - which propels rather than constrains their system.
And certainly whilst they declared themselves to be Marxists they also problematise Marxism quite regularly, as a narrative of development and as a potentially constraining identity-form. Nonetheless, what seems to me really clear is that Anti-Oedipus, at least, is completely traversed by Marx and Marxism. The conjunction of free labour and undetermined wealth; the engineering of social relations through money; the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; the Asiatic mode of production: these are all fundamentally important concepts to their work. So it would be very difficult to just extract Marxism from Deleuze and Guattari, as DeLanda suggests one can do. It appears that the problem with capitalism for DeLanda is simply one of monopoly: so ‘small is beautiful’, and all one needs to do is to abstract labour
Doi:10.3898/newf.68.09.2009 Deleuzian Politics? a RounDtable Discussion 143
relations from monopoly formations, and that solves the problem that Deleuze and Guattari call ‘capital’.
Jeremy: DeLanda’s formulation is based on Braudel’s distinction between ‘markets’ and ‘anti-markets’, and the consequent claim that capitalism is only defined by ‘anti-market’ monopoly institutions, rather than by the market as such.

Have a Nice World War, Folks
by John Pilger

Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence" Robert Gates complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.

According to an American general, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marja" from the Taliban's "command and control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marja is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and parades of flag-wrapped coffins through the Wiltshire town of Wooten Basset were not a cynical propaganda exercise.

"War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is revealed as having no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to values" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) compared with today's public reckoning of a liar and war criminal.

Could Bloomberg Lawsuit Mean Death to Zombie Banks?
by Mary Bottari

My recollection is a bit hazy. How does one kill a zombie exactly? Do you stake it? Cut off its head? Nationalize it? Perhaps it's time to ask the experts at Bloomberg News.

Lost in the haze of the hoopla surrounding the insurance reform bill was some big news on the financial reform front. On March 19, Bloomberg won its lawsuit against the Federal Reserve for information that could expose which "too big to fail" banks in the United States are walking zombies and which banks were merely rotting.

Bloomberg, which has done some of the best reporting on the financial crisis, is also leading the charge on the fight for transparency at the Federal Reserve and in the financial sector. While many policymakers and reporters were focusing their attention on the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout bill passed by Congress, Bloomberg was one of the first to notice that the TARP program was small change compared to the estimated $2-3 trillion flowing out the back door of the Federal Reserve to prop up the financial system in the early months of the crisis.

Way back in November 2008, Bloomberg filed a Freedom of Information Act request asking the Fed what institutions were receiving the money, how much, and what collateral was being posted for these loans. Their basic argument: when trillions in taxpayer money is being loaned out to shaky institutions, don't the taxpayers deserve to know their chances of being paid back?

Not according to the Fed. The Fed declined to respond, forcing Bloomberg to sue in Federal Court. In August of 2009, Bloomberg won the suit. With the backing of the big banks, the Fed appealed, and this month, Bloomberg won again. A three judge appellate panel dismissed the Fed's arguments that the information was to protect "confidential business information" and told the Fed that the public deserved answers.

Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’
by Chris Hedges

The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept aside, in times of economic collapse, before thugs and demagogues emerge to play to the passions of the crowd. I have seen this drama. I know each act. I know how it ends. I have heard it in other tongues in other lands. I recognize the same stock characters, the buffoons, charlatans and fools, the same confused crowds and the same impotent and despised liberal class that deserves the hatred it engenders.

"We are ruled not by two parties but one party," Cynthia McKinney, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, told me. "It is the party of money and war. Our country has been hijacked. And we have to take the country away from those who have hijacked it. The only question now is whose revolution gets funded."

The Democrats and their liberal apologists are so oblivious to the profound personal and economic despair sweeping through this country that they think offering unemployed people the right to keep their unemployed children on their nonexistent health care policies is a step forward. They think that passing a jobs bill that will give tax credits to corporations is a rational response to an unemployment rate that is, in real terms, close to 20 percent. They think that making ordinary Americans, one in eight of whom depends on food stamps to eat, fork over trillions in taxpayer dollars to pay for the crimes of Wall Street and war is acceptable. They think that the refusal to save the estimated 2.4 million people who will be forced out of their homes by foreclosure this year is justified by the bloodless language of fiscal austerity. The message is clear. Laws do not apply to the power elite. Our government does not work. And the longer we stand by and do nothing, the longer we refuse to embrace and recognize the legitimate rage of the working class, the faster we will see our anemic democracy die.

The Imprisonment of Jafar Panahi
18 March 2010
Tariq Ali

It’s one of those ironies of history: a by-product of the clerical revolution in Iran was the emergence of a new wave of Iranian cinema. Kiarostami became the most celebrated auteur in the west, but he was part of a much larger creative and critical community. They view each other’s work at rough-cut stage, they comment on scripts, they suggest actors: there is a strong sense of solidarity. The cinematic language is varied, the interior destiny of each filmmaker is different, but even the self-contained Makhmalbaf family benefits from being part of a larger group. Watching their work one can see the influences that stretch from Rossellini, Fellini and Godard to Kurosawa, Ray and Hou Hsia-hsien.
I’ve always regarded one of this group, Jafar Panahi, as the country’s most fearless filmmaker. The Circle revolved round the oppression of women and the religious police. Offside revealed the Iranian passion for football and the absurdity of denying women the right to watch it in the stadium (Panahi’s daughter is a football fanatic). Crimson Gold is a neo-realist masterpiece, where fragments of reality are combined to reveal an astonishing mosaic: the raw greed of the moneyed elite. The class structure in Iran is rarely mentioned and Panahi’s film (scripted by Kiarostami) was popular inside the country and DVDs circulate even in the villages.
Over two weeks ago, Iranian security forces raided his house and arrested him together with his wife and daughter. The latter were released after 48 hours, but Panahi is still in prison. The state prosecutor, Abbas Jafari Daulatbadi, has insisted that it is ‘not a politically motivated arrest’. What else could it be? A new form of cinema criticism? It’s obvious that the regime was angered by Panahi’s public support for the students during the upheavals that followed the rigged elections of 2009. It may also be that he was preparing a new film on the subject and the authorities have carried out a pre-emptive strike. Whatever the reasoning, it is unacceptable. Panahi needs the support of writers, filmmakers and artistic communities everywhere.

Those who wish to sign the appeal for Panahi should contact a.r.khatami (at) gmail.com

Unhappy Yemen
Tariq Ali

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n06/tariq-ali/unhappy-yemen

I left for Yemen as Obama was insisting that ‘large chunks’ of the country were ‘not fully under government control’, after Senator Joseph Lieberman had cheerfully announced that it was a suitable target for war and occupation. The sad underwear bomber who tried to blow up the Amsterdam flight on Christmas Day had triggered a new interest in the country, and in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), by claiming that while he was converted to hardcore Islamism in Britain, his crash course in suicide terrorism, mercifully inadequate, had been provided by AQAP somewhere in Yemen.

Yemen is a proper country, unlike the imperial petrol stations dotted across other parts of the Arabian Peninsula, where the ruling elites live in hurriedly constructed skyscrapers designed by celebrity architects, flanked by shopping malls displaying every Western brand, and serviced by wage-slaves from South Asia and the Philippines. Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, was founded when the Old Testament was still being written, edited and collated. It’s true that the new Mövenpick hotel in the heart of the city’s diplomatic enclave is reminiscent of Dubai at its worst – when I was there it was pushing its Valentine’s Day Dinner Menu – but in Yemen the elite is careful and doesn’t flaunt its wealth.

The old walled city was rescued from extinction-via-modernisation by Unesco (and later the Aga Khan Trust) in the 1980s, and the old wall rebuilt. The ninth-century Great Mosque is currently being restored by a team of Italian experts working with local archaeologists who are uncovering artefacts and images from a pre-Islamic past. Whether they will manage to locate a small structure said to have been built on the same site during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime remains to be seen. Sana’a’s architecture is stunning, like nothing else in Arabia or anywhere else in the world. Its buildings – skyscrapers eight or nine storeys high – were constructed in the tenth century and renovated 600 years later in the same style: lightly baked bricks, decorated with geometric patterns in gypsum and symmetrical stone carvings (wood was unavailable or in short supply). What is missing are the hanging gardens on every floor that gripped the imagination of medieval travellers.[*]

A little but of humor in all this madness. -rg

The Green They Steal, The Greed They Wear
A St. Patrick's Day Lament

by Michael Moore
Friends,

It was amazing. Every story on the front page of Monday's New York Times told the story of the Age of Greed during which a system known as capitalism is slowly, but surely, killing us:

Insurance company greed: "Millions Spent to Sway Democrats on Health Care"

War profiteers: "Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants"

There's no profit in repairing our infrastructure: "Repair Costs Daunting as Water Lines Crumble"

China, the bank: "China Uses Rules on Global Trade to Its Advantage"

You mean NAFTA didn't improve life in Mexico: "Two Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock US Consulate"

What happens when Big Food profits from hurting kids: "Forget Goofing Around: Recess Has New Boss"

There's now a daily parade of news like this -- well, not really "news," more like the media division of large corporations shoving your face into the dirt that is your life. You already know the schools are a disaster and the war is a boon for the Halliburtons and a bust for you. You don't need a newspaper to tell you the roads and electrical lines and the local sewage plant is in miserable disrepair.

And by now you've figured out that you don't really have any say in this, that what we call the "democratic process" is mostly a sham, pretty words that get repeated in the hopes we will all still fall for it. But the fix is in and we don't fall for it anymore. Admit it: Wall Street owns "our" Congress lock, stock and big barrel o' campaign cash. You want a say in this? Well, I don't see you on the Forbes 400, so shut the f@*& up and go fetch me another bottle of bubbly.

Within days, the House of Representatives will vote to pass the Senate health care "reform" bill. This bill is a joke. It has NOTHING to do with "health care reform." It has EVERYTHING to do with lining the pockets of the health insurance industry. It forces, by law, every American who isn't old or destitute to buy health insurance if their boss doesn't provide it. What company wouldn't love the government forcing the public to buy that company's product?! Imagine a bill that ordered every citizen to buy the extended warranty on all their appliances? Imagine a law that made it illegal not to own an iPhone? Or how 'bout I get a law passed that makes it compulsory for every American to go see my next movie? Woo-hoo! Who wouldn't love a sweet set-up like this windfall?

Well, the insurance companies -- get this -- don't like the Democrats' bill! That alone should be reason enough to vote for it.

Now, you would think these thieves would love this bill -- but they are actually fighting it. Why? Because it doesn't give them ONE HUNDRED PERCENT of the what they want. It only gives them... 90%! YOU SEE, pure greed demands all or nothing.

The insurance industry hates this bill because it puts a few minor restrictions on them. Six months after its passage they won't be able to deny children coverage if they have a pre-existing condition. How awful! Government interference! SOCIALISM!

Those Authoritarian, Torture-Loving French
by Glenn Greenwald

French documentarians conducted an experiment where they created a faux game show -- with all the typical studio trappings -- and then instructed participants (who believed it was a real TV program) to administer electric shock to unseen contestants each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing potency for each wrong answer. Even as the unseen contestants (who were actors) screamed in agony and pleaded for mercy -- and even once they went silent and were presumably dead -- 81% of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the authority-figure/host and kept administering higher and higher levels of electric shock. The experiment was a replica of the one conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, where 65% of participants obeyed instructions from a designated authority figure to administer electric shock to unseen individuals, and never stopped obeying even as they heard excruciating screams and then silence. This new French experiment was designed to measure the added power of television to place people into submission to authority and induce them to administer torture.

None of this should be at all surprising to anyone who has observed, first, the American political and media class, and then large swaths of the American citizenry, enthusiastically embrace what was once the absolute taboo against torture, all because Government officials decreed that it was necessary to Stop the Terrorists. But I just watched an amazing discussion of this French experiment on Fox News. The Fox anchors -- Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum -- were shocked and outraged that these French people could be induced by the power of television to embrace torture.

Mental Prototypes and Monster Institutions. Some Notes by Way of an Introduction
Translated by Nuria Rodríguez
Universidad Nómada

Nuria Rodríguez (translation)

Mental Prototypes

For quite a while now, a certain portmanteau word has been circulating in the Universidad Nómada’s[1] discussions, in an attempt to sum up what we believe should be one of the results of the critical work carried out by the social movements and other post-socialist political actors. We talk about creating new mental prototypes for political action. This is due to the importance, in our eyes, of the elusive and so often unsuccessful link between cognitive diagrams and processes of political subjectivation. That is, the link between the knowledge that allows powers and potentials to be tested on one hand and, on the other, the semiotic, perceptual and emotional mutations that lead to the politicisation of our lives, become personified in our bodies, and shape the finite existential territories that are channelled into or become available for political antagonism. We believe there is a need to create new mental prototypes because contemporary political representations, as well as many of the institutions created by the emancipatory traditions of the 20th century, should be subjected to a serious review - at the very least - given that, in many cases, they have become part of the problem rather than the solution.

In this respect, the anniversary of the 1968 world revolution – an unavoidable reference given the month in which we are writing this text - shouldn't be used as an excuse to wallow in amorphous nostalgia for the passing of the “age of revolutions”. Just the opposite - it should be used to demonstrate the extent to which some of the unsuitable signs of that world revolution are still present in a latent state, or, to be more precise, in a state of “frustrated virtuality”. “68” interests us because, even though it didn’t come out of the blue, it was an unforeseeable world event – a historical fork in the road that left a trail of new political creations in a great many different parts of the world. Ultimately, it motivates us because its unresolved connections and even its caricatures allow us to consider the problem of the politicisation (and metamorphosis) of life as a monstrous intrusion of the unsuitable into history (the history of capitalist modernity and postmodernity)[2].

Over the last forty years, this latency has been subject to a series of quite significant emergences. The latest and perhaps most important, the one that is generationally closest to us, is the one in which the “movement of movements”, or the global movement, played a central role. But in spite of its extraordinary power, it hasn't always been fruitful enough in terms of generating the "mental prototypes" that we believe are so necessary. At least, it’s not clear that it has been able to produce prototypes that are sophisticated, robust and complex enough to generate innovative and sustained patterns of political subjectivation and organisation that make it possible to at least attempt a profound transformation of command structures, daily life, and the new modes of production[3]. The articles included in the monograph we are introducing here emerge from these issues – which, in the present context, we can only summarise and reduce to a few fundamental aspects. We’ve decided to avoid a merely speculative approach, and to remain as far as possible from declarations of how the political forms of the movements “should-be”; rather, we try to present a series of experimentations – not to exemplify, but more in the manner of case studies, as experiences that are being tested in practice – that are currently trying to overcome the predicaments and shortfalls that we’ve just mentioned.

How Iran's Workers Fight Ahmadinejad's Neoliberal Cutbacks

The Iranian Tsunami

By CONN HALLINAN

Earthquakes, like the recent Haitian and Chilean monsters, are not subtle events: They flatten buildings, crush houses, and turn infrastructures into concrete and steel confetti. But earthquakes can also generate a power that remains largely unseen until a huge tsunami rises out of the sea and obliterates a coastline.

It is a metaphor that comes to mind when Amin is talking about the political earthquake in Iran. Amin can’t use his real name, nor can he afford to identify where he lives or works. Being an active trade unionist in Iran is a dangerous job description. “If three workers meet they get thrown into solitary confinement,” he says.

When most Americans think about the recent upheavals in Iran, it is about marches demanding democracy and challenging the June 12 presidential election. The face of those protests is the “Green Movement”—so called because its supporters wear green—that put millions of people into the streets of Teheran and other large cities throughout the country.

Largely unseen, and rarely reported on, however, are thousands of strikes, slow downs and sit-ins by workers challenging the erosion of trade union rights and the government’s drive to privatize the economy, plus instituting policies that will impoverish tens of millions of people.

According to Amin, over the next few months the government will begin dismantling $20 billion a year in subsidies for gasoline, water, electricity, rice, flour, bus fare, and university tuition. “The Iranian people made these things, fought for these things,” says Amin. “They are all that is left of the [1979] revolution.”

Along with the draconian cutbacks in subsidies, Amin says the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is rapidly privatizing the public sector and turning it over “to his buddies in the Revolutionary Guard.” According to official government statistics for 2008, a third of state assets have already been privatized, the vast bulk of it under Ahmadinejad. In many ways this dismantling of the public sector resembles the privatization plan Russia instituted in the 1990s that ended up turning over vast sections of the economy to oligarchs at bargain basement prices.

The resistance to the cutbacks and privatization comes mainly from the trade union movement—much of it underground— but that can be a very perilous undertaking in Iran.

Hundreds of unionists have been fired, threatened, or jailed under brutal conditions over the past few years. Mansour Osanioo, president of the Teheran bus drivers union, was recently released from solitary confinement, but only after an international campaign led by the International Transport Workers Federation and the Indonesian seafarers union, Kesatuan Pelaut Indonesia.

The International Trade Union Confederation, Iranian unions and human rights groups have called for the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate the persecution of trade unionists in Iran.

Men like Osanioo, bus driver union vice-president Ebrahim Madadi, and Reza Rakhshan, a leader of the sugar cane workers union, are either in prison or fighting to stay free. But in spite of the efforts by the government to stamp out unionism, strikes continue to roil Iran. According to Amin, “there are thousands of small and large labor actions.”

Some 600 workers at Bandar Abbas Refinery Development Company struck to recover five months of unpaid wages. Over 800 workers at the Dena Rah Sasan civil engineering company struck over the same issue, closing off the main gates with heavy trucks. Shiraz Iran Telecommunications Industries workers staged a sit-in at the provincial governor’s mansion over back wages, and a series of rolling strikes over wage and pension reductions paralyzed the Mobarakeh Steel Complex.

Amin says the government is trying to undermine labor laws that are enshrined in the constitution. “Workers are guaranteed collective bargaining rights and the right to organize. Iran’s labor law is one of the most progressive in the world. And they are trying to change this.”

One employer strategy is to increase the number of “temporary workers.” According to Amin, “temps” now represent upwards of 60 to 70 percent of the workforce. They have no benefits and are largely at the mercy of arbitrary firings and periodic layoffs. The trade union movement is trying to organize these “temps,” a risky undertaking in the current climate created by the government. “We have a police state and we can’t organize ourselves,” he says.

Which is why, he says, the unionists are “100 percent behind” the democratic reform movement.

For the moment, the reform movement appears to be on the ropes. The government has closed over 50 newspapers and magazines, and the brutality of the police and Basij militia largely prevented the Green Movement from filling the streets of the nation’s major cities on Feb. 11, the 31st anniversary of the revolution.

The authorities first silenced the Internet—one of the Green Movement’s key organizing tools—and then flooded the streets with the police and militia. Hundreds of people were beaten, tear-gassed and arrested, and many still remain in jail. The regime also executed two dissidents on the eve of the demonstrations, and sentenced nine other political prisoners to death.

While the Green Movement has support in many of the nation’s cities, it has not yet recruited the bulk of the Iranian people to its banner. According to a recent poll conducted by the Program for International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, a majority of the population believes that Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election, and shows no particular interest in regime change.

But the same polls also reflected increasing disillusionment with the general economic situation, and specifically with the Ministry of the Interior. Only a little over a third supports the Ministry’s policies, and that disillusionment will almost certainly sharpen when subsides disappear and rising prices and inflation cut yet more deeply into people’s incomes. Unemployment is around 12 per cent, and according to Reze Shahhabi of the Teheran Vahed Bus Workers Syndicate, many workers must hold multiple jobs to make ends meet.

Billionaires and Mega-Corporations Behind Immense Land Grab in Africa
Mail & Guardian / By John Vidal

20+ African countries are selling or leasing land for intensive agriculture on a shocking scale in what may be the greatest change of ownership since the colonial era.
March 10, 2010 |

Awassa, Ethiopia -- We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia's largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 50 acres* -- the size of 20 soccer fields.

The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 1,500 foot rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tons of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world's most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.

The 2,500 acres of land which contain the Awassa greenhouses are leased for 99 years to a Saudi billionaire businessman, Ethiopian-born Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, one of the 50 richest men in the world. His Saudi Star company plans to spend up to $2-billion acquiring and developing 1.25 million acres of land in Ethiopia in the next few years. So far, it has bought four farms and is already growing wheat, rice, vegetables and flowers for the Saudi market. It expects eventually to employ more than 10,000 people.

CHRIS MARKER’S SECOND LIFE

Iggy Atlas: Why is this conversation on SL [Second Life] rather than in RL [real life]?
Sergei Murasaki: I hope it’ll go faster.
IA: How did you come to have an exhibition on SL?
SM: Curiosity at first. Then it becomes addictive.
IA: How so?
SM: Have you read Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel?
IA: No, neither of us have read it. Shame on us?
SM: Well, it’s nothing to be proud of. In any event, it’s exactly the world of that masterpiece that I came to find in SL.
IA: Can you describe it for us?
SM: A dream state. The sense of porousness between the real and the virtual.
IA: Actually, what has your experience been in this virtual world?
SM: An example: when Serge told me there’d be two of you, my REFLEX was, “We’ll need a third chair.” Which in reality would be stupid, but isn’t here.
IA: This island, the objects that are here, the Museum . . . Are you their creator and owner?
SM: No, I’ve never been the owner of anything. Some Viennese friends took care of putting it all together. They’re pretty neat folks.
IA: How much time do you spend on SL?
SM: Not an enormous amount, because I still have LOTS of work in RL. But if I could . . .
IA: If you could?
SM: I would retire here for good. Like Brando in Tahiti. There’d be fewer worries in terms of maintenance.
IA: How do you perceive the way in which this virtual space and its users have invented a life, an economy, a virtual commerce of things and monies?
SM: The whole commerce aspect of it I find just as boring as I do in real life. Besides, I don’t understand it at all. But then again, I don’t understand the economy of the real world to begin with . . .
IA: How does SL fit into the context of your artistic preoccupations?
SM: I don’t believe I’ve ever had “artistic preoccupations.” I’m a cobbler. This is supercobbling.
IA: What you’ve managed to cobble to date, when it was made, seems to have prophesized today’s technologies, almost as if it was conjuring them, don’t you think?
SM: You really ought to lighten up your vocabulary. “Artistic,” “prophesize.” None of this is like me in the least. I think I’ll stick to cobbling, with all that’s inherently honorable in artisanal undertakings.
IA: Doesn’t SL, and don’t all these new ways of communicating, let you indulge your proclivity for secrecy and mystery?
SM: It would seem if you’re not on TV all the time, then you have a proclivity for mystery. Let’s just leave it at that. Though I did like that a critic, who wrote about the Zurich exhibition, said I was “born to be an avatar.”
IA: Precisely. The choice of a pseudonym, your absence from the media, make so much sense in this enterprise, and the adopting of a new virtual avatar.
SM: Are there any real avatars?
IA: Masks?
SM: Ah, that’s something else altogether. Max Jacob used to tell the story of two Masks who made a rendezvous, having never seen each other, naturally. And when they removed their masks, surprise: “It was neither one nor the other.”
IA: Is an avatar or a pseudonym a mask for you? A way of creating a partition between your cobbling and what the rest of the world calls “a work,” “of art” . . . ?
SM: I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, that is easy to pronounce in most languages because I intended to travel. You need search no further than that.
IA: But since then, you’ve created a character that’s universally considered to be an artist.
SM: I never much worried about how I was considered.
IA: The delocalized exhibition on SL is entitled “A Farewell to the Movies.” How should this farewell be interpreted?
SM: Please . . . It’s “A Farewell TO Movies.” An homage to Hemingway. A way of saying farewell to cinema, undoubtedly, but without exaggerating. The constitutional right to contradict oneself was inscribed in the charter Baudelaire drew up.
IA: From a farewell to arms to a farewell to films . . . Should we consider that film is an arm?
SM: Of course not. That’s simply a euphonic correspondance. You must never attribute so much intentionality to me.
IA: So . . . does cinema belong to the past?
SM: One can play with that idea. Godard does it very well. But he is a filmmaker.
IA: Have you never considered yourself a filmmaker?
SM: Ne-ver.
IA: What label would you prefer, then? Multimedia cobbler?
SM: Cobbler, definitely. Multimedia . . . well, that belongs to contemporary jargon.
IA: Will new technologies in some way modify your relationship to images, to sounds, and what you do with them?
SM: Of course. To be able to make a whole film, The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004], with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention . . . and to then go sell the DVDs I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market . . . I confess, I felt triumphant. From producer to consumer, directly. No surplus value. Marx’s dream come true.
IA: Speaking of which, the exhibition mixes portraits of artists, images from older and more recent demonstrations, photos of political personalities. How would you define the relationship between your cobbling and what is commonly called ideology?
SM: I’m afraid what is commonly called ideology no longer has any relationship at all with its original defintion. To begin with, it was a ruse of war. Today, it’s merely a substitute for a war that doesn’t exist. But we could go on about this at length . . .
IA: Hasn’t your work always had a political dimension?
SM: It has been said to. Myself, to put it in a nutshell, I’ve always said that politics, which is the art of compromise—and thank goodness for that—in no way interests me. What does interest me is history. I would add: “Politics interests me to the extent it cuts a slice into history.” But I hate repeating myself.
IA: In films such as 2084, your work outlined a hypothetical future. Today, there’s talk of the end of ideologies, you’re saying farewell to films, Godard talks about the death of cinema, the real is no longer all there is . . . What has been eclipsed for you, even as other things have been born?
SM: Malraux had a wonderful formula, which curiously no one has taken up: “The thing that is born where values die, and that does not replace them.” The difficulty of these times is that before bringing in new ideas, we’d have to destroy all the simulacra that the century and its favorite instrument, television, have generated to replace everything that has disappeared. This is why I’m passionate about the new information grid, the Internet, blogs, etc. Inevitably, there’s some slag, but a new culture will be born of it.

Counterpunch Diary

Relax, the Empire's in Safe Hands

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Are they really bumblers? The establishment’s opinion columns quiver with reproofs for maladroit handling of foreign policy by President Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Meanwhile, those who cherished foolish illusions that Obama’s election might presage a shift to the left in foreign policy fret about “worrisome signs” that this is not the case.

It’s true that there have been some embarrassing moments. Vice President Biden, on a supposed mission of peace to Israel, is given the traditional welcome – a pledge by Israel to build more settlements, plus adamant refusal to reverse the accelerating evictions of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.

Hillary Clinton, touring Latin America, was not greeted with gobs of spit, like vice president Nixon back in 1958, but she did get a couple of robust diplomatic slaps from Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Armorim, rejecting Mrs. Clinton’s hostile references to Venezuela and call for tougher action toward Iran. Amid detailed news reports of butchered activists in Tegucigalpa, Latin Americans and even some Democratic members of the U.S. Congress listened incredulously to Mrs. Clinton’s brazen hosannas to the supposedly violence-free election of Honduras’ new, U.S.-sanctioned President Lobo in a process to which both the Organization of American States and the European Union refused to lend the sanction of official observers.

Meanwhile, China signals its displeasure at the U.S. with stentorian protests about Obama’s friendliness toward the Dalai Lama. The PRC continues its rumblings about shrinking its vast position in U.S. Treasury bonds.

The Turks recall their ambassador from Washington in the wake of a vote in a U.S. congressional committee to recognize the massacre of the Armenians in 1916 as “genocide.” Russia signals its grave displeasure at Mrs. Clinton’s rejection, in a speech at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, of President Medvedev’s proposal to negotiate a new security pact for Europe. “We object to any spheres of influence claimed in Europe in which one country seeks to control another's future,” she said. Shortly before this categorical statement, Poland announced that the U.S. would deploy Patriot missiles on its territory, less than 50 miles from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.

An Interview with Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond

Will Capitalism Absorb the World Social Forum?

By MARGA TOJO GONZALES

From 21 January to 2 February 2010 Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond, both involved in alterglobalization activism, members of the International Council of the WSF, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the international network CADTM[1] (Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt), participated in various international events and meetings in Brazil: international seminar of social movements (Sao Paulo, 21 - 23 January), international youth camp at Novo Hamburgo, international seminar entitled '10 years later: challenges and proposals for another possible world' organised by the Group of Reflection and Support for the WSF Process, that consists of several Brazilian organizations, among which IBASE, Ethos and Instituto Paulo Freire (Porto Alegre, 25 - 29 January 2010), the assembly of social movements (Porto Alegre, 29 January). Though they develop a critical analysis, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond consider that the World Social Forum can still act as a positive stimulant, but only in specific conditions. Interview.

Marga Tojo Gonzales : 10 years after the first use of the catchphrase 'another world is possible,' a majority of humankind still live in subhuman conditions, and with the international financial crisis the situation has become even worse. Does this mean that the alterglobalist movement has failed?