Activism, academia, and new technologies the complicities of theorised and mobilised resistances in the globalising discourses of speed

BETWEEN ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA: THE COMPLICITIES OF ALTER-GLOBALIST RESISTANCES IN SPEED INGRID MARIA HOOFD (M. A. WOMENS STUDIES AND FILM STUDIES (HONS.), UTRECHT UNIVERSITY, THE NETHERLANDS) A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE 2006 Acknowledgements This dissertation is the culmination of many fruitful and instructive years spent in various activist and academic settings. I want to thank the Department of English Language and Literature and the University Scholars Project at the National University of Singapore for providing me with the excellent resources to my research and complete this dissertation. I also want to thank the Women’s Studies Department at Utrecht University for giving me the necessary background and enthusiasm to further pursue my research interest abroad. I also want to thank the various activist projects and groups I participate and have participated in over the years for all the dialogue, friendships, materials and insights. I extend my warmest thanks to Ryan Bishop for all his patience, suggestions, comments, humour, and inspiration throughout the last few years. The assistance of George Landow, Irina Aristarkhova and John William Phillips has also been invaluable. I am also grateful for all the loving support and encouragement my friends in Europe and Singapore, as well as my family in the Netherlands, have given me from nearby and from afar. Without them, this dissertation would not have found its completion. And last but not least, thanks to Sandra Khor Manickam for being my companion throughout the journey. ii Chapter One Complicities of resistance: activisms in terms of material and discursive production 1.1 The stakes and paradoxes of alter-globalist resistance 1.2 Complicating activisms: folding back what has been projected as ‘outside’ 1.3 Naturalising humanism: the productive foundation of activism 16 1.4 Romanticising the margins and forging alliances 26 1.5 The technological prosthesis and the increasing reproduction of inequalities 31 1.6 Discourses of the speed-elite 37 1.7 The aporetic productivity of the practice-theory dichotomy 46 1.8 Outlining alter-globalist activist strategies that are complicit in speed 54 Chapter Two Fantasies and tools of the speed-elite: radical new media theory and activism 2.1 Repetitions of acceleration: frantic hope, hidden despair 58 2.2 Radical new media thinkers: tactical media, autonomous zones and digital multitudes 69 2.3 Indymedia, the permanent autonomous zone? 80 2.4 Repeating the dream of speed: academia and Indymedia activism 97 2.5 Continuing deconstruction: from technology to mobility 101 Chapter Three Italian thought and the obsession with the migrant: the speed-elite’s daydream of radical alterity 3.1 The rise of a metaphor: radical thought and the migrant 106 3.2 Hypermodernism, the speed elite, and its narrative of redemption 115 3.3 Complicities of radical Italian thought: imagining an ‘ally par excellence’ 123 3.4 Empire and the self-serving rhetoric of the ‘subversive’ poor migrant 133 3.5 No-border theories, Italian thought, and new media activist rhetorics 141 iii 3.6 Radical Italian thought and European and Australian no-border activism 148 3.7 Productive migrations across the borders of nation and of other institutions 154 Chapter Four Dichotomies and spaces of the speed-elite: activism, academia, and the carrying forward of justice 4.1 The plot thickens: the quest for justice and its complicities in speed 159 4.2 The cry for activism: the etymology of a concept 166 4.3 The dispersed university: academia’s contingent borders 173 4.4 Concepts and borderlands, or how to loyally betray one’s productive foundations 178 4.5 Being on the border: the cry for activism within activist-research 186 4.6 Caught in the productive action-thought aporia 200 4.7 The necessity and complicity of justice and thought 208 Chapter Five The speed elite and beyond: empowering ourselves to death? 213 Bibliography 231 iv Summary This dissertation examines the ways in which several alter-globalist activist groups and thinkers, as well as left-wing academic theorists, mobilise discourses and divisions in an attempt to overcome gendered, raced and classed oppressions worldwide. In particular, this dissertation will draw out how these mobilisations and theorisations, despite (or because of) their liberatory claims, are actually implicated in the intensification of global hierarchies by repeatedly invoking narratives of transcendence, connection, progress and speed. Drawing from the quests for justice and truth that inspire current new media activism, radical Italian thought, and the concept of academia, this dissertation will argue that the humanist aporia that underlies all these practices, is what paradoxically also triggers the increasing disenfranchisement along lines of gender, class and race worldwide. Moreover, validating itself through the productive borderlines of academia and activism, this dissertation acknowledges that it is itself similarly implicated in these discourses and its concurrent reproduction of speed. Chapter One will outline the relevant theories of technologies (of the subject) and their entanglements with the contemporary globalisation of neo-liberalism and humanism. The chapter will propose to analyse connection of technologies and discourses of liberation and empowerment with neo-liberal capitalism through the notion of complicity, as well as through the idea of the aporia underlying the humanist utopia of liberation. Following this argument, the chapter will argue that these complicities facilitate foremost the emergence of a new global elite – the ‘speed-elite’. Next, Chapter Two will analyse the complicities of new media activism in the discourses and tools that underpin technocratic globalisation and this new ‘speed-elite’. In particular, the chapter will look at how the contradictions that underpin new media activism paradoxically lead to an increasingly problematic call for empowerment through virtualisation. Chapter Three will follow up on this analysis by critically examining the appearance of the migrant metaphor in radical Italian thought and activism. The chapter will point out that the rise of this metaphor is an effect of the desires of the ‘speed-elite’ to universalise humanism, cross borders and attain transcendence. The fantasy that such desires would be liberatory for ‘the oppressed’ erases the urgent analysis of the conditions of possibility that facilitate the ‘speed-elite’. Subsequently, Chapter Four will take the previous analyses to another plane by pointing out that the production of this dissertation itself is complicit in the very same discourses of speed. This is because it seeks to productively cross the borders of activism and academia as well as thought and action, arguing problematically that such a hybrid position is a location that speaks justice and truth. However, as with the analyses of activism, the play of the thought-action binary will be shown to be precisely the fundamental aporia that underlies the quest for speed as well as justice. Finally, Chapter Five will draw together the conclusions of the previous chapters and set out to question the stakes and consequences that these findings call forth. v Chapter One: Complicities of resistance: activisms in terms of material and discursive production “Let’s make things better.” Philips Electronics global brand campaign slogan. (2000) “Let us globalise the Struggle.” Slogan at the D14 anti-European Union protests. (2001) “Everyone resists, from gays and lesbians to rightist survivalists--so why not make the logical conclusion that this discourse of resistance is the norm today . ?” Slavoj Žižek, “A Symptom—of What?” (494, 2003) “The general ideology of global development is racist paternalism; its general economics capital-intensive investment; its broad politics . the subaltern as the rhetoric of their protest.” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. (373, 1999) 1.1 The stakes and paradoxes of alter-globalist resistance Let me, in order to plunge headlong into the complexity of the issues at stake, start this dissertation at one of those memorable protests against globalisation my feminist and anarchist friends and I participated in, which took place in Brussels on December 14, 2001. The targets of these D14 protests, which were attended by as many as 70000 people that day, were the latest decisions of the European Union and its capitulation to the demands of global capital. The European Union’s increasingly neo-liberal capitalist policies were condemned by the protesters for aggravating the gender, race and class gaps both within Europe and worldwide. We argued that these new policies would lead to an increasing feminisation of poverty and to the exclusion of ever more people from access to education, transport and (new) technologies. We understood policymaking within the European Union itself as an elitist practice, equal to those of corporate finance policies of exploitation, and only in favour of those people who were already rich, male, white and comfortable. Since we felt that the corporate media were not to be trusted for very much the same reasons, an ad-hoc Independent Media Centre and website were set up in an old deserted cinema building in the centre of Brussels, in order to enable the protesters to make public the ‘truth’ about the alter-globalist and liberatory ideas and intentions of the D14. Furthermore, word of the protests was supposed to spread this way, creating and enforcing alliances around the globe between us protesters and all oppressed peoples under the spread of neo-liberal capitalist globalisation. A few months later, in February 2002, some of my feminist colleagues and I were attending a European Union meeting on education and new technologies. I attended in the capacity of my post as a New Media Project Coordinator at a Women’s Studies department of a Dutch university, which had hired me partly because of my knowledge of and ties to new media and feminist activist groups ‘outside’ the university. The questions addressed at the particular meeting were varied: how to bridge the gender, race, and class disparities within Europe; how to create access to education and new technologies through, for instance, online learning programmes for those who are disabled or who have no money to travel abroad to get a degree, and how to enable and increase physical student mobility and lifelong learning so that people get more opportunities to empower themselves through knowledge-gathering. Most of the organisers of the meeting were women, and large sums of money were allocated during the meeting to tackle the issues discussed – all off which hopefully would create equal wealth and opportunity for all within Europe, as well as in the long run for all worldwide. The logic of this fight between protesters and policy makers was repeated several months later in a public debate organised by a student activist group in my home university. The student protesters accused the Dutch university rectors and heads of having fallen for the evils of neo-liberal capitalism by signing the European Union Bologna convention – a convention set up to facilitate inter-university travel, third-party sponsoring and international conversion of diplomas and grades. Students empowered themselves by putting themselves discursively in the position of the imagined ‘moral voice of the people of Europe’, by asserting that what the university originally stood for, it should continue to stand for: the pursuit of ‘untainted’ knowledge, truth and reason as a moral obligation to liberate and empower people. This was an obligation that should be carried out objectively, and which should be disconnected from ‘dirty’ politics, such as corporate economics. Of course, the rectors replied in desperation that the upholding and saving of the university’s main function in society as a moral place in which the quest for knowledge and reason can continue was exactly what made them sign the Bologna Treaty and introduce third-party funding. The broad similarities between the discourses of truth and empowerment employed by both on the surface seemingly oppositional groups – the anti-EU- and student-protesters and the university- and EU-policymakers – may strike the reader as extraordinary. Both groups clearly operated with the good intentions of a democratising and empowering politics. But the point of my recollecting these personal memories is not to claim that the alter-globalist activists are completely deluded in their resistance against and critique of the European Union, nor that these European Union and university policies and decisions are totally benevolent. Instead, it is to introduce the reader to the likelihood that these similarities on the level of rhetoric may not be accidental, and that determining whose claims are repressive and whose are actually helping the oppressed, may not be as easily made as it seems at first glace. More particularly, the similarities suggest that every activist claim to be on ‘the oppressed’ side, to ‘really do’ something about injustices, as well as every subsequent demonisation of certain institutions as the ‘evil oppressor’ or as merely privileged or elitist, whether this be academia or the European Union, marks exactly activism’s complicity in such reproductions of inequality. This is because such activism accuses those institutions of doing what activism itself also does. Perhaps then, in the cases of the above D14 and student protests examples, the very same forces that constitute the European Union make possible the very protests against the European Union, and the counter-voices put up by students and protesters in effect reproduce the founding myths of the institutions they are protesting against. I must warn readers here that the aim of mapping out such complicities is not eventually to claim that a certain type of politics or activism is possible that may transcend such complicities and become ‘liberating for all’. Such a claim would itself reproduce those myths that underlie the discourse of truth and liberation it inevitably seeks to critique. Instead, I suggest that complete non-complicity is essentially an impossibility, whether it is on the level of alter-globalist protests or on the level of this individual dissertation and its entanglements with certain institutions that facilitate latecapitalist production. This impossibility marks the continuing desire to identify with and uphold a narrative of emancipatory progress – both within activisms and within academia. This may draw our attention to what are perhaps the stakes of such tainted struggles: no less than the survival of certain groups and their linguistic arrangements into the next century, as these groups and arrangements suffer gradual erasure in a world of increasing military intensification and casualty. The standpoint claim to be ‘on the oppressed side’ is therefore no mean feat or frivolity, and it is not my aim to denounce such a politics at all: it is serious business with very serious consequences. My suggestion is that perhaps such a politics may end up biting itself in the tail when it is not aware of its reproduction of those hierarchies that facilitated its own self-image as ‘truly resistant and subversive’ in the first place. This investigation into complicities is therefore of great interest to many alterglobalist and new media activists who have, since the start of such ‘global protests’, felt unhappy or uncomfortable about having to identify with certain groups within alterglobalism whose visions they conventionally assumed as completely disparate. For instance, numerous left-wing factions have great trouble walking side by side with certain extreme nationalist right-wing groups; certain eco-activists are disturbed by the many wasteful high-technological branches of the alter-globalist movement; certain feminist factions have problems with a number of Marxist groups for their continuing misogyny; global peace activists are anxious over the incessant participation of small numbers of protesters who use physical violence to show their disagreement with specific policies or Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. “Beyond Human Rights.” In: Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt (eds): Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1996). Anti-racist Group for Free Flooding. URL (consulted October 2004): http://www.antimedia.net/nooneisillegal/. Armitage, John and Joanne Roberts. “Chronotopia.” In: Living with Cyberspace. Technology & society in the 21st century. London: Continuum (2002). Armitage, John and Phil Graham. “Dromoeconomics: Towards a Political Economy of Speed.” In: parallax. vol. 7, no. 1. London: Routledge, pp.111-123 (2001). Armitage, John. “Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology. The Politics of Cyberculture in the Age of the Virtual Class.” In: CTheory.net. URL (consulted 22 April 2003) http://www.ctheory.net/printer.asp?id=111 (1999). Armitage, John. “From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond. An Interview with Paul Virilio.” In: Theory, Culture and Society, Vol.16 (5-6). London: Sage (1999). Armitage, John. “Ontological Anarchy, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the Politics of Cyberculture.” In: Angelaki. Machinic Modulations: New Cultural Theory and Technopolitics. Vol.4, No.2, September (1999). Arnison, Matthew. “Open publishing is the same as free software.” URL (consulted March 2004): http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html (2001). Autonoom Centrum. URL (consulted March 2004): http://www.xs4all.nl/~ac/. Barker, Colin and Laurence Cox. “’What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Academic and activist forms of movement theorising.” URL (consulted September 2004): http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/afpp/afpp8.html (2003). 231 Baudrillard, Jean. “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media.” In: Simulacra and simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press (1994). Baudrillard, Jean. “The Final Solution.” In: The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press (2000). Baxterwatch. URL (consulted October 2004): http://www.baxterwatch.net/. Beckerman, Gal. “Emerging Alternatives. Edging Away from Anarchy.” In: Columbia Journalism Review. Issue 5, September 2003. New York: Columbia University Press. URL (consulted June 2005): http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/ (2003). Berry, David and Giles Moss. “The Libre Culture Manifesto.” In: Free Software Magazine, issue 2. URL (consulted August 2005): http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_02/pdfs/FSM_issue_02_libre_m anifesto.pdf (2005). Bey, Hakim. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia (1991). Bishop, Ryan and John Phillips. “Diasporic Communities and Identity Politics: Containing the Political.” In: Goh, Robbie and Shawn Wong (eds), Asian Diasporas. Cultures, Identities, Representations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press (2004). Bishop, Ryan. “The Cold War Global R and D University.” Unpublished manuscript (2005). Blümle, Gerold and Nils Goldschmidt. “Walter Eucken – Vordenker einer freiheitlichen Ordnung.” In: Wisu – Das Wirtschaftsstudium, 32: pp.1027-1030 (2003). Borgmann, Albert. “Hyperreality.” In: Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1992). Boud. “Can independent, grassroots Iranian media stop US attack on Iran?” In: The IMCEurope Archives. URL (consulted April 2005): http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imceurope/2005-April/0402-yz.html (2005). 232 Bousquet, Marc, and Tiziana Terranova. “Recomposing the University.” In MetaMute. Culture and Politics After the Net. No. 28. URL (consulted June 2005): http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=28 &NrSection=10&NrArticle=1403 (2004). Bove, Arianna and Erik Empson. “The Dark Side of the Multitude.” In: MakeWorlds Neuro – networking Europe. URL (consulted September 2004) http://www.makeworlds.org/book/view/36 (2003). Brennan, Timothy. “The Italian Ideology.” In: Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed): Debating Empire. London: Verso (2003). Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities.” In: Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (eds) Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso (2000). Butler, Judith. “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire.” In: During, S. (ed): The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge (1999). Butler, Judith: “Dynamic Conclusions.” In: Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek (eds): Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso (2000). Cleaver, Harry. “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle.” URL (consulted April 2005): http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/zaps.html (1998). Cleaver, Harry. “Computer-linked Social Movements and the Global Threat to Capitalism.” URL (consulted June 2002): http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/polnet.html (2002). “Consensus Decision Making.” In: Los Angeles Independent Media Center Collective Docs. URL (consulted March 2004): http://la.indymedia.org/LA_IMC_Docs_001.html. Cultural Analysis Summer Academy (CASA). Acting and Spectating 2004. URL (consulted October 2004): http://casa.manifestor.org/ (2004). 233 Cunninghame, Patrick. “For an Analysis of Autonomia – An Interview with Sergio Bologna.” In: libcom.org library. URL (consulted June 2006): http://libcom.org/library/analysis-of-autonomia-interview-sergio-bologna-patrickcunninghame. Dean, Jodi. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” In: Cultural Politics. Oxford: Berg Publishers, pp.51-73 (2005). Derive Approdi. “luoghi comuni: il movimento globale come spazio di politicizzazione.” Rome: Derive Approdi (2003). Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’.” In: Cornell, Drucilla, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds). Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge (1992). Derrida, Jacques. “Politics and Friendship. A Discussion with Jacques Derrida.” Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex. URL (consulted November 2004): http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/frenchthought/derrida.htm (December 1997). Derrida, Jacques. “The Future of the Profession or the University without Condition (thanks to the ‘Humanities’, what could take place tomorrow).” In: Jacques Derrida and the Humanities. A Critical Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002). Derrida, Jacques. “The Laws of Reflection. Nelson Mandela: In Admiration.” In: Derrida, Jacques and Mustapha Tlili (eds) For Nelson Mandela. New York: Seaver Books (1987). Derrida, Jacques. “Wears and Tears (Tableau of an Ageless World).” In: Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York: Routledge (1994). Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Transl. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1996). Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or The Prostesis of Origin. Transl. Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1998). 234 Derrida, Jacques. “Mochlos, or: The Conflict of the Faculties.” In: Logomachia. The Conflict of the Faculties. London: University of Nebraska Press (1993). Derrida, Jacques. “Provocation: Forewords.” In: Without Alibi. Edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press (2002). Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated and with an introduction by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1981). Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other. New York: Bison Books (1988). Derrida, Jacques. “To Do Justice to Freud.” In: Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. California: Stanford University Press (1998). Desert Storm Indymedia. URL (consulted December 2004): http://antimedia.net/desertstorm/. Dominijanni, Ida. “From the Italian laboratory of the 1970s to the global laboratory of a politics opposed to forms of war.” aut-op-sy mailing list archive. URL (consulted October 2005): http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2004m10/msg00019.htm (2004). Duden Deutsches Universalworterbuch. Second edition. Mannheim: Duden Verlag (1989). Eagleton, Terry. “The Enlightenment is dead! Long live the Enlightenment!” In: Harper’s Magazine. March 2005. New York: Harper’s Magazine, pp.91-95 (2005). Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick (eds). Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge (2002). Electronic Frontier Foundation. Defending Freedom in the Digital World. URL (consulted March 2004): http://www.eff.org/. 235 European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations. URL (consulted November 2005): http://www.uu.nl/uupublish/onderzoek/onderzoekcentra/ercomer/24638main.html. “Expressionismus.” In: Literaturepochen. URL (consulted June 2006): http://members.aon.at/livingbox/expressionismus.html. “Facoltà di Fuga.” In: MetaMute. URL (consulted July 2005): http://docs.metamute.com/view/Home/FacoltaDiFuga. Facoltà di Fuga. “EU free and self-governing European university.” In: rekombinant mail-archive. URL (consulted July 2005): http://www.mailarchive.com/rekombinant@autistici.org/msg00355.html. Fadil, Nadia. “De hersenschim van de onderdrukte moslimvrouw.” In: Indymedia Belgium. URL (consulted March 2004): http://belgium.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/60732_comment.php#60770 (2003). Foster, Wayne. “Border Camps: The New ‘Sexy’ Thing?” In: Greenpepper Magazine. December 2002. URL (consulted June 2005): http://squat.net/cia/gp/hom3c.php?artid=141&back=/cia/gp/hom.php (2002). Garcia, Neil. “Performativity, the bakla, and the orientalising gaze.” In: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1:2 (August 2000). “Give Up Activism.” In: Do or Die, issue 9. URL (consulted June 2005): http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm. Glocal Research Space. “Activist Research.” In: Greenpepper. Winter ’03. URL (consulted July 2005): http://www.mucolin.de/gp-03-04/PDF/gp_03-04_empirearticles.pdf (2003). Goddard, Anne. “Woomera 2002.” URL (consulted October 2004): http://library.sievxmemorial.org/agoddard001.htm. 236 Grosz, Elizabeth. “Ontology and Equivocation. Derrida’s Politics of Sexual Difference.” In: Nancy Holland (ed). Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press (1997). Halleck, DeeDee. “Gathering Storm: The Open Cyber Forum of Indymedia.” Paper presented at Our Media Not Theirs conference. Barcelona, Spain, July 2002. URL (consulted January 2005): http://www.ourmedianet.org/om2002/papers2002/Halleck.IAMCR2002.pdf (2002). Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. The Reinvention of Nature. New York, Routledge (1991). Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” In: Fox-Keller, E. and Longino, H. (ed): Feminism and science. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1996). Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (2000). Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude. War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin Press (2004). Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” In: Cahoone, L. (ed). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge/Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers (1996). Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In: David Farrell Krell (ed). Basic Writings from Being and Time to The Task of Thinking. New York: HarperCollins Publishers (1977). HelpB92. URL (consulted November 2005): http://helpb92.xs4all.nl/. Henshaw-Plath, Evan. “Email interview about indymedia tech vision.” In: Mediapolitics Archives. URL (consulted June 2005): http://archives.lists.indymedia.org/mediapolitics/2001-November/000041.html (2001). 237 Hoofd, Ingrid. “Indymedia Debate @ N5M4.” In: The IMC-Europe Archives. URL (consulted March 2004): http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-europe/2003September/001511.html (2003). Hudson, David. “Re: Ghandis running amok.” In: OpenMute. URL (consulted June 2005): http://docs.metamute.com/view/Open/OrganisationalStructures (2002). Illich, Fran: “Ready to Delete the Border.” In: MakeWorlds, 2004. URL (consulted May 2005): http://www.makeworlds.org/node/134 (2004). “IMC UK Mission Statement.” Indymedia UK. URL (consulted March 2004): http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/mission.html. “Indymedia Debate @ n5m.” Indymedia Documentation Project. URL (consulted December 2003): http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/NextFiveMinutes. “Indymedia: don’t hate the media, be the media,” “Indymedia: precursors and birth” and “Indymedia: who are we?” In: Notes from Nowhere (ed): we are everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso (2003). “Indymedia’s Frequently Asked Questions.” In: Indymedia Documentation Project. URL (consulted January 2004): http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/FrequentlyAskedQuestionEn. International Office of Migration. URL (consulted November 2005): http://www.iom.int/. Investigacció. “1st International Conference on Social Movements and Activist Research.” URL (consulted May 2005): http://www.investigaccio.org/downloads/tripticeng.pdf. Jordan, Tim. “Ethics, Activisms, Futures.” In: Activism! Direct action, hacktivism and the future of society. London: Reaktion Books (2002). Juris, Jeffrey. “Indymedia: From Counter-Information to Informational Utopics.” In: Investigacció: Jornades Recerca Activista. URL (consulted June 2005): http://www.investigaccio.org/ponencies/juris3.pdf (2004). 238 Kamuf, Peggy. “Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition.” In: Holland, Nancy (ed). Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Univerity Press (1997). Kamuf, Peggy. “Violence, Identity, Self-Determination, and the Question of Justice: on Specters of Marx.” In: De Vries, H. and S. Weber (eds). Violence, identity and selfdetermintation. Stanford: Stanford University Press (1997). Kamuf, Peggy. “Deconstruction and Love.” In: Royle, Nicholas (ed): Deconstructions: a user’s guide. Hampshire: Palgrave (2000). Kamuf, Peggy. “The University in the World It Is Attempting to Think.” In: Culture Machine no. 6, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/kamuf.htm (2004). Katsiaficas, George. “Italian Autonomia.” In: The Subversion of Politics. European autonomous movements and the decolonization of everyday life. New Jersey: Humanities Press International (1997). Kein Mench Ist Illegal. URL (consulted March 2005): http://www.contrast.org/borders/kein/archiv.html. Kidd, Dorothy. “Indymedia.org. A new Communication Commons.” In: McCaughey, Martha and Michael D. Ayers (ed): Cyberactivisms. Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge (2003). Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics. Transl. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack. London: Verso (1985). Lewis, Kanthi. “Civil Disobedience and Woomera.” In: The UTS website. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.international.activism.uts.edu.au/conferences/civildis/lewis.html (2005). Lovink, Geert. “Network Fears and Desires.” In: Dark Fiber. Tracking Critical Internet Culture. Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press (2002). 239 Lovink, Geert. “The Technology of News.” In: Subsol. URL (consulted June 2005): http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/lovinktext2.html (2002). Lovink, Geert and Florian Schneider. “A Virtual World is Possible. From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes.” In: Artnodes. Intersections Between Arts, Sciences and Technologies. URL (consulted February 2005): http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/art/lovink_schneider0603/lovink_schneider0603.html (2003). Lovink, Geert and Florian Schneider. “Reverse Engineering Freedom.” In: MakeWorlds. URL (consulted May 2005): http://www.makeworlds.org/book/print/20 (2003). Lovink, Geert and Gayatri Spivak. “Pax Electronica: Against Crisis-Driven Global Telecommunication.” In: Lovink, Geert: Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia. Cambridge/Massachusetts: MIT Press (2002). Lovink, Geert and Soenke Zehle. “Incommunicado. Information technology for everybody else.” URL: http://www.incommunicado.info/ (October 2005). Martin, Fran. “Dismembering Theory: working notes.” In: The Dept. of English at NCU Taiwan website. URL (consulted March 2005): http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~eng/journal/journal_park12.htm (2004). Mauzz. “Re: wijlen het globale Indymedianetwerk?” In: IMC-Netherlands Editorial Archive. imc-nl-editorial@indymedia.nl, (18 May 2005). “MDI doet aangifte tegen Indymedia NL.” In: Indymedia.NL (Nederland). URL (consulted February 2004): http://indymedia.nl/nl/2002/10/6738.shtml (2002). Mezzadra, Sandro and Fabio Raimondi: “Van mondiale beweging naar multitude.” In: Globalinfo. URL (consulted July 2004): http://www.globalinfo.nl/article/articleprint/17/1/1/ (2002). Mezzadra, Sandro. “Citizenship in motion.” In: MakeWorlds. URL (consulted August 2004): http://www.makeworlds.org/node/83 (2004). 240 Mezzadra, Sandro. “The Right to Escape.” In: Ephemera - theory of the multitude, 4(3), 2004. URL (consulted July 2004): http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-3/43mezzadra.pdf (2004). Mitropoulos, Angela. “Flotilla Of Hope Update.” In: Indymedia Sydney. URL (consulted August 2004): http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=41985 (2004). Mitropoulos, Angela. “Movements against the enclosures: Virtual is preamble.” In: MakeWorlds. URL (consulted July 2004): http://www.makeworlds.org/node/133 (2004). Mitropoulos, Angela. “The micro-physics of theoretical production and border crossings.” In: borderlands, vol.3 no. 2, 2004. URL (consulted August 2004): http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no2_2004/mitropoulos_microphysic s.htm (2004). Mobilized Investigation: “Mission Statement.” URL (consulted April 2005): http://manifestor.org/mi/en/2003/01/13.shtml. Mouffe, Chantal. “Radical Democracy or Liberal Democracy?” In: Trend, David (ed): Radical democracy: identity, citizenship, and the state. New York: Routledge (1996). Negri, Antonio and Danilo Zolo. “Empire and the multitude. A dialogue on the new order of globalisation.” In: generation-online. URL (consulted July 2004): http://www.generation-online.org/t/empiremultitude.htm (2002). Negri, Antonio. “M as in .” In: Negri on Negri. Antonio Negri in conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle. London: Routledge (2004). Neilson, Brett. “Italy in Translation. Radical Thought Dislocated to the Antipodes.” In: aut-op-sy mailing list archive. URL (consulted October 2005): http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2004m10/msg00019.htm (2004). Neilson, Brett. “Neither here or elsewhere. Interview with Sandro Mezzadra,” in MakeWorlds - Neuro – networking Europe. URL (consulted November 2004): http://www.makeworlds.org/book/view/17 (2003). 241 Next Five Minutes International Festival of Tactical Media. URL (consulted March 2005): http://www.next5minutes.org/index.jsp. Nigam, Aditya. “The Old Left in a New World: The Mumbai Resistance?” E-mail on undercurrents@bbs.thing.net, (24 December 2003). Nik. “Personal account from the Woomera 2002 protests in Australia.” In: Nettime. URL (consulted October 2004): http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold0204/msg00106.html. No-Border Network. URL (consulted September 2004): http://www.noborder.org/news_index.php. “No Borders, No Nations.” In: we are everywhere. the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso (2003). Nussbaum, Martha. “The Professor of Parody.” In: The New Republic Online, http://www.tnr.com/archive/0299/022299/nussbaum022299.html (2000). “NYC IMC – adopts moderation for their newswire.” In: Indymedia.NYC (New York City). URL (consulted September 2003): http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imcsc/2003-July/001662.html. Obadiah. “Woomera Tales.” In: aut-op-sy mailing list archive. URL (consulted August 2004): http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2002m04/msg00016.htm. “Open Publishing, Editorial Policy, Decision Making.” In: Pittsburgh Independent Media Centre. URL (consulted March 2004): http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/process/openpub.php. Pasquinelli, Matteo. “Radical machines against the techno-empire.” In: rekombinant.org. URL (consulted August 2004): http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2264 (2004). 242 Partridge, Eric. Origins. An etymological dictionary of Modern English. London: Routledge (1990). Pavis, Theta. “The rise of the Indymedia movement.” In: Online Journalism Review. January 2002. URL (consulted April 2005): http://www.cb3rob.net/~merijn89/ARCH2/msg00013.html (2002). Perlstein, Jeff. “The Independent Media Center Movement.” In: MediaAlliance. URL (consulted April 2005): http://www.mediaalliance.org/article.php?story=20031109003144928&query=perlstein (2003). Platon, Sara and Mark Deuze. “Indymedia Journalism: A radical way of making, selecting and sharing news?” In: Journalism. London: Sage, pp. 336-355 (2003). Ponzanesi, Sandra. “Diasporic Subjects and Migration.” In: Griffin, Gabrielle and Rosi Braidotti (eds): Thinking Differently. A Reader in European Women”s Studies. London: Zed Books (2002). “Principles of Unity.” In: Indymedia Documentation Project. URL (consulted November 2003): http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/PrinciplesOfUnity. Readings, Bill. “Theory after Theory. Institutional Questions.” In: Kaplan, E. Ann and George Levine (eds): The Politics of Research. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press (1997). Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1996). Rete Nationale Ricercatori Precari. URL (consulted September 2004): http://www.ricercatoriprecari.org/. Rete Nationale Ricercatori Precari. “Globalisation, academic flexibility and the right to research: A call for a European network of precarious/temporary researchers and for the free circulation of knowledge.” URL (consulted August 2005): http://www.euromovements.info/html/xarca-precaris-it.htm. 243 Richardson, Joanne. “The Language of Tactical Media.” In: Sarai Reader 2003: Shaping Technologies. URL (consulted March 2004): http://www.sarai.net/journal/reader3.html (2003). Robbins, Bruce. “Oppositional Professionals. Theory and the Narratives of Professionalisation.” In: Arac, J. and B. Johnson (eds). Consequences of Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1991). Rustin, Michael. “Empire: A Postmodern Theory of Revolution.” In: Balakrishnan, Gopal (ed): Debating Empire. London: Verso (2003). Ryan, Michael. “The Theory of Autonomy.” In: Politics and Culture: working hypotheses for a post-revolutionary society. London: MacMillan Press (1989). Schultz, Pit: “Pit Schultz interview with Paul Garrin.” In: Nettime. URL (consulted November 2005): http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9706/msg00094.html. Shaw, Martin. “A Question to Jacques Derrida.” URL (accessed July 2005): http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hafa3/derrida.htm (1997). Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. London: Penguin Books (1961). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti and Mary Zournazi. “The Rest of the World.” In: Zournazi, Mary. Hope. New philosophies for change. New York: Routledge (2002). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty and David Plotke. “A Dialogue on Democracy.” In: Trend, David (ed.) Radical democracy : identity, citizenship, and the state. New York: Routledge (1996). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Criticism, Feminism and The Institution.” In: Harasym, Sarah (ed): The Post-colonial Critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. New York: Routledge (1990). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Marginality in the Teaching Machine.” In: Outside in the Teaching Machine. London/New York: Routledge (1993). 244 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Practical Politics of the Open End.” In: Harasym, Sarah (ed): The Post-colonial Critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. New York: Routledge (1990). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Cambridge/Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (1999). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “In the New World Order: A Speech.” In: Callari, Antonio, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener (eds): Marxism in the Postmodern Age. New York: The Guilford Press (1995). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model. Derrida’s ‘Limited Inc.’” In: The Spivak Reader. New York: Routledge (1991). Sullivan, Sian. “Barcelona 22-25 January 2004: First International Conference on Social Movements and Activism.” URL (consulted July 2005): http://www.euromovements.info/html/sian-investigaccio.htm. The IMC – A New Model. Temporal version on The Indymedia Documentation Project. URL (consulted April 2004): http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/FirstEditionOfINDYMEDIAHANDBOOK (2004). “The Indymedia Debate.” Next Five Minutes Festival of Tactical Media. Amsterdam, 11-14 September 2003. URL (consulted February 2004): http://www.next5minutes.org/n5m/article.jsp?articleid=1712 (2003). Traweek, Sharon. “Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies.” In: Pickering, A. (ed): Science as Practice and Culture. London: University of Chicago Press (1992). Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt. Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1996). 245 Virno, Paolo. “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus.” In: Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt (eds): Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1996). “Was ist Indymedia?” In: Indymedia Germany. URL (consulted March 2004): http://germany.indymedia.org/static/ms.shtml. West, Cornel. “Theory, Pragmatism, and Politics.” In: Arac, J. and B. Johnson (eds): Consequences of Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press (1991). White, Jess. “Restore the commons! Break the borders!” In: Greenpepper Magazine. December 2002. URL (consulted July 2005): http://squat.net/cia/gp/hom3c.php?artid=157&back=/cia/gp/hom.php. White, Jess. “We Are Human Beings: the Woomera Breakout.” In: we are everywhere. the irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso (2003). Wilkie, Rob. “The Daydreams of iPod Capitalism.” In: The Red Critique. No.10, Spring 2005. URL (consulted March 2005): http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2005/thedaydreamsofipodcapitalism.htm (2005). Woomera2002. URL (consulted September 2004): http://woomera2002.antimedia.net/. x-border. URL (consulted August 2004): http://www.antimedia.net/xborder/. Žižek, Slavoj. “A Symptom-of What?” In: Critical Inquiry. Vol.29, No.3, Spring (2003). Zournazi, Mary. “The Rest of the World. A Conversation With Gayatri Spivak.” In: New Philosophies for Change. New York: Routledge (2003). 246 [...]... productive in a more unsettling and hopefully more loving and just way because it is this quest for justice that stands at the basis of my own personal activist and academic endeavours, commitments and responsibilities The interesting ‘accident’ of the growth within the alter-globalist movement of these reciprocal annoyances and fights which each other, is then that the event of the coming together of such... function and be productive, and that it is here (in the double sense of the adverb), at this moment of enunciation, that it’s fundamental complicities arise As such, a drawing out of complicities will trace back, or fold back into the surface of an action or standpoint, the contingencies of those founding ideas that had been made ‘hidden’ or ‘othered’ in the process of enunciation of that very standpoint Interestingly... evolution and action (whether capitalist or liberatory), relies upon the constant precarious ‘reproduction of 26 marginality’ For instance, Spivak, in the interview with Elizabeth Grosz entitled “Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution,” interestingly talks about the turn of the nonWest towards the West in terms of a “command.” (8) By this she implies that, while the taking up of the position of a feminist... engaged in, result in one particularly pervasive discursive strategy that in the light of recent alter-globalist activism deserves further attention This strategy consists of the conception of an ‘ideal other’ that is in essence a projection of the self In “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” Gayatri Spivak discusses how the revalidation of the West and the fantasy of the autonomous agent as the proper... allows The breeding of awareness and gesturing towards otherness is therefore also important in the face of the new technologies instilling an erasure of how that which one (as activist or as an academic) enjoys or feels empowered in doing affects others and eventually affects oneself 1.4 Romanticising the margins and forging alliances According to Derrida, the ‘double affirmation’ or ‘first and second... But the belief of breaking with a heritage, the belief in emancipation, then confirms its humanist heritage by internalising it, says Derrida In The Future of the Profession,” Derrida performs at length what we, whether being activists or theorists professing to a mode of humanist truth, are in fact repeatedly choosing without the memory of this aporia’s trace It is this gap, and the discursive and. .. condition that drives these praxes and institutions forward The activisms under scrutiny in the following chapters perpetuate the problematic universalisation of humanism both by their professing claims for utopias of liberation, as well as through exacerbating the ‘doing’ versus ‘thinking’ binary typical of metaphysical viewpoints Since both idealistic academics and inspired activists, pressing for liberatory... of the margin.” (59) As such, they seemingly prove and extend the universal applicability of the humanist subject and its technologies The identification of the (voice from the) margin, like the oppressed’ or the Third world’, then taps into the Enlightenment aspiration to extend its own humanist belief system This is not to say that ‘naming the margin’ cannot be empowering or productive – on the. .. speed elite’ They argue that this results in a material strengthening of neo-liberal hegemony through the exponential use of technologies of mobility, connection, and border-crossing desired by this elite, eventually enforcing and spreading humanist and modernist myths such as ‘freedom’ and ‘transcendence from constraints.’ The dominant discourses of technologies, and in particular the fantasy of ‘freedom... as to the genealogies of what they reproduce By the same token, the possibility of my writing this dissertation by means of strategically toggling between critique and deconstruction is a sign of my continuation of and responsibility towards these activisms and the grounding notions they require I am therefore greatly indebted to these activisms, in particular to the tensions that result from the aporia . 1.4 Romanticising the margins and forging alliances 26 1.5 The technological prosthesis and the increasing reproduction of inequalities 31 1.6 Discourses of the speed- elite 37 1.7 The aporetic. borders of nation and of other institutions 154 Chapter Four Dichotomies and spaces of the speed- elite: activism, academia, and the carrying forward of justice 4.1 The plot thickens: the. responsibilities. The interesting ‘accident’ of the growth within the alter-globalist movement of these reciprocal annoyances and fights which each other, is then that the event of the coming together of such