Websites with information on the Tarnac9:

the US support committee - http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/

the main French support site - http://www.soutien11novembre.org/

fragments from 'Introduction to Civil War' - http://www.softtargetsjournal.com/v21/tiqqun.php

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10. Civil war is the free play between forms-of-life; it is their principle of co-existence.

...

12. The point of view of civil war is the point of view of the political.

(from 'Introduction to Civil War')

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This is from Semiotext, via Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance. It is in reference to the arrest of people in France on 'terrorist' charges, notably of Julien Coupat from Tiqqun.  The Tiqqun book, a small 88page book that fits in your back pocket and has been distributed free across Europe in recent months, is one of the most interesting and provocative political, philosophical texts to have arisen in the last 50 years.  It marks a shift from the initial moves made by people such as Monsieur Dupont, to the beginnings of a strategic political position that looks testable and - perhaps more interestingly - worth testing.  In the face of the current conjuncture of economic, political and philosophical tremors (albeit the latter in a reasonably disparate way, perhaps just another perturbation that is normal) this 'Call' is worth noticing. 

If anyone can translate from the French the short piece that is contained in this file - or has a French translation of it - that would be useful.  In the meantime, perhaps something like Agamben's public statement might be organised over in the UK or more widely.

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La_Fabrique.doc

A recent operation by the French police, intensively covered by the French and to some extent international media, ended in the arrest and indictment of nine people under anti-terrorist laws. The nature of this operation has already undergone a change: after the revelation of inconsistency in the accusation of sabotaging French railway lines, the affair took a manifestly political turn. According to the public prosecutor: “the goal of their activity is to attack the institutions of the state, and to upset by violence – I emphasize violence, and not contestation which is permitted – the political, economic and social order.”

The target of this operation is larger than the group of people who have been charged, against which there exists no material evidence, nor anything precise they can be accused of. The charge of “criminal association for the purposes of terrorist activity” is exceptionally vague: what constitutes “association”, and how are we to understand the reference to “purposes” other than as a criminalization of intention? As for the qualification “terrorist”, the enforced definition is so broad that it could apply to practically anything – and to possess such and such a text or to go to such and such demonstration is enough to fall under this exceptional legislation.

The individuals who have been charged were not chosen at random, but because they lead a political existence. They have participated in demonstrations, most recently against the less than honorable European summit on immigration in Vichy. They think, they read books, they live together in a remote village. There has been talk of clandestinity: they have opened a grocery store, everyone knows them in the region, where a support committee has been organized against their arrest. What they are looking for is neither anonymity nor refuge, but rather the contrary: another relation than the anonymous one of the metropolis. In the end, the absence of evidence itself becomes evidence against them: the refusal of those who have been charged to give evidence against one another during their detention is presented as a new indication of their terrorism.

In reality, this whole affair is a test for us. To what degree are we going to accept that anti-terrorism permits anyone to be arrested at any time? Where are we to place the limit of freedom of expression? Are emergency laws adopted under the pretext of terrorism and security compatible with democracy in the long term? Are we ready to let the police and the courts perform an about-turn in the direction of a new order? It is for us to respond to these questions, and first by demanding the end of these investigations and the immediate release of these nine people whose indictment is meant as an example for us all.

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A statement of support by Giorgio Agamben is pasted in below.

TERRORISM OR TRAGICOMEDY?

On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal conspiracy with terrorist intentions.” The newspapers reported that the Ministry of the Interior and the Secretary of State “had congratulated local and state police for their diligence.” Everything is in order, or so it would appear. But let’s try to examine the facts a little more closely and grasp the reasons and the results of this “diligence.”

First the reasons: the young people under investigation “were tracked by the police because they belonged to the ultra-left and the anarcho autonomous milieu.” As the entourage of the Ministry of the Interior specifies, “their discourse is very radical and they have links with foreign groups.” But there is more: certain of the suspects “participate regularly in political demonstrations,” and, for example, “in protests against the Fichier Edvige (Exploitation Documentaire et Valorisation de l'Information Générale) and against the intensification of laws restricting immigration.” So political activism (this is the only possible meaning of linguistic monstrosities such as “anarcho autonomous milieu”) or the active exercise of political freedoms, and employing a radical discourse are therefore sufficient reasons to call in the anti-terrorist division of the police (SDAT) and the central intelligence office of the Interior (DCRI). But anyone possessing a minimum of political conscience could not help sharing the concerns of these young people when faced with the degradations of democracy entailed by the Fichier Edvige, biometrical technologies and the hardening of immigration laws.

As for the results, one might expect that investigators found weapons, explosives and Molotov cocktails on the farm in Millevaches. Far from it. SDAT officers discovered “documents containing detailed information on railway transportation, including exact arrival and departure times of trains.” In plain French: an SNCF train schedule. But they also confiscated “climbing gear.” In simple French: a ladder, such as one might find in any country house.

Now let’s turn our attention to the suspects and, above all, to the presumed head of this terrorist gang, “a 33 year old leader from a well-off Parisian background, living off an allowance from his parents.” This is Julien Coupat, a young philosopher who (with some friends) formerly published Tiqqun, a journal whose political analyses – while no doubt debatable – count among the most intelligent of our time. I knew Julien Coupat during that period and, from an intellectual point of view, I continue to hold him in high esteem.

Let’s move on and examine the only concrete fact in this whole story. The suspects’ activities are supposedly connected with criminal acts against the SNCF that on November 8 caused delays of certain TGV trains on the Paris-Lille line. The devices in question, if we are to believe the declarations of the police and the SNCF agents themselves, can in no way cause harm to people: they can, in the worst case, hinder communications between trains causing delays. In Italy, trains are often late, but so far no one has dreamed of accusing the national railway of terrorism. It’s a case of minor offences, even if we don’t condone them. On November 13, a police report prudently affirmed that there are perhaps “perpetrators among those in custody, but it is not possible to attribute a criminal act to any one of them.”

The only possible conclusion to this shadowy affair is that those engaged in activism against the (in any case debatable) way social and economic problems are managed today are considered ipso facto as potential terrorists, when not even one act can justify this accusation. We must have the courage to say with clarity that today, numerous European countries (in particular France and Italy), have introduced laws and police measures that we would previously have judged barbaric and anti-democratic, and that these are no less extreme than those put into effect in Italy under fascism. One such measure authorizes the detention for ninety-six hours of a group of young – perhaps careless – people, to whom “it is not possible to attribute a criminal act.” Another, equally serious, is the adoption of laws that criminalize association, the formulations of which are left intentionally vague and that allow the classification of political acts as having terrorist “intentions” or “inclinations,” acts that until now were never in themselves considered terrorist.

— Giorgio Agamben
Libération, November 19, 2008

This is an old Real audio radio programme I made.  I've been thinking of doing some more work with sound and so dug this out and had a listen and I still find it interesting, so it has an audience of 1 at least ;-)

Blu19 real audio file (right click to save-as)

If anyone can convert it to an MP3 then that would be cool (I don't have an app on my machine and am not about to buy one just for this one task) - you can upload files to the anonymous FTP server at razorsmile.org if you do happen to convert it...

I'm fascinated by this, an excellent idea ... anyone come across these before or heard anything about them?

TV-B-Gone: Turn off Any TV! :: TV-B-Gone from Cornfield Electronics

"the repetition seemed to save him", this repetition that explodes the flow, brake on the breakdown, the break erupts discontinuously as a loop or fold of intensity, forms the larval self which is constituted precisely in this break, this crack in the flow.  the flow is not given but that which gives the given, yet it is the crack which receives or holds the given as given.  the repetition is given as a crack or flash, as connection.  one crack is the given of reflection, another the given of necessity, another the given of temporality.  flash, fold, intensity - interaction, relationship, signification.

deep within the mirrored mirrors, that combinatory matrix of infinite eternal return, sits the daimon of time and self, the winking eye glinting back at that me who looks trembling into the tain.  as we stare at each of our reflections in the infinite series of mirrors, one of me waves back and winks.

a daimon of time and self arises from the gap, crack, splash, flash breaking open the flow with the fold, disrupting the average with its stupidity, isolating the sense of the reflection, memory splinter and coherence splint.  strapping up the wound, we feel the depth of mortal gods weighing lightness with smoke.

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

by Terry Bisson

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

(read the rest here meat.rtf )

Artists spliced fake nuclear blast into TV weather news | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Steal this Film, II (review by Felix Stalder)

The other night, I watched "Steal this Film, II" [1]. The first thing I noticed is how extremely efficient bittorent can be. I downloaded the HD version, 1.71 GB, in less than three hours over my plain vanilla cable line and leaving the connection open for the rest of the night, I distributed the equivalent of 2.5 copies to others.

This experience reinforces the main point of the film: file-sharing -- a technologically super-charged, deep cultural practice -- is beyond the point where it can be stopped. The old media industry has lost control over the distribution of content, radically reducing the power of the current gate keepers to determine who can access the archives, who can produce new works, and who can reach an audience with those works.

The film's premise is that file-sharing is transforming the basic mechanism of how culture and information is distributed with consequences as profound as the transformation brought about by the printing press. Now, for anyone who remembers the late 1990s, this introduces a certain deja-vu, since this argument was pretty much what fueled the dot.com boom back then. But here, it is delivered with a twist. It's not the happy venture-capital infused entrepreneurs who turn the wheels of change, but the pirates who expand the scope of the possible for the masses, and the teenagers who have already claimed this new space as their natural cultural environment. This is not a top-down revolution.

So far the first layer of the argument. The second argues that this is pretty similar to how the print revolution unfolded in the 17th and 18th century. At the time, a battle raged between those who tried to control the spread of knowledge in the service of established power, and those who ignored print privileges and censorship laws by distributing unauthorized knowledge thus contributing the emergence of the reading publicj, which later established itself as a political actor in form of the public opinion. In one of the strongest interview scenes of the film, print historian Bob Darnton speaks of pirate printers situated just outside the reach of the French king in a "fertile crescent" (from Amsterdam to Geneva) publishing books specially for the French markets thus preparing the ground for the enlightenment and, ultimately, the French Revolution in 1789. This point is reinforced by another, even more eminent historian of print, Elisabeth Eisenstein, who tells of a case of a Dutch printer who used the (French) index of censored books as his publishing program because he knew these books would sell well. Drawing on these two historians, the film is suggests that there is a general connection between the loss of control over the distribution of knowledge and the overthrow of the old regimes. This loss of control was not brought about by the magic of technology itself, but by the determination of the people who used the technology to its full extent, even if it brought them in direct opposition to the dominant powers.

That this is happening again today is not a co-incidence, but, and this is the third layer of the argument, because the internet was created precisely for this purpose. To make this point, a clip is used from a 1972 documentary [2] where J.C.R. Licklider speaks about the need to invent a better system of information sharing than print because of the physical limitations of moving around paper which strike him as "embarrassing." This is a treasure of a find, since Licklider, who was instrumental in funding the early work on the Arpanet, really speaks about information "sharing", not distribution or any such thing.

The fourth and final layer of the argument is that the sharing of culture is constitutive of culture itself and corresponds with a deep human need to communciate. Indeed, communicating is sharing and in an information society producing culture is a way of taking part in society. P2p technology then is simply giving new power to this defining feature of human existence, which was only somewhat subdued in the analog media environment where, as Eben Moglen puts it, "control came naturally as part of the process of the existence of the medium itself."

To deliver this argument, the film sets up a long string of talking heads, some of them quite well known others less (I'm one of them), intersected by footage from a wide range of archival sources edited for associative value and held together by an off commentary connecting the pieces into a well paced narrative. The film is very well made, stylistically a significant improvement over the first part [3] even if it doesn't reach the brilliance of Adam Curtis [4] whose style of documentaries is so clearly invoked here. There is, after all, still a difference between working on a shoe string budget or on the commanding heights of the BBC. Still, the production quality is professional and the film is full of nice visual details.

The film's narrative, of course, is not without flaws. The fmost significant is its breathless "it-cannot-be-stopped" rhetoric. While that might be true in a technical sense (p2p certainly beats video-on-demand), one should not expect that is impossible to craft more centralized means of control even on such a radically deecntralized communication protocol. As we all know, the old slogan "the internet intrprets censorship and damage and routes round it" is not a very good approximation to the layered realities of online control. Thus while the old gatekeepers might lose control, it's pretty save to say that new ones will appear. Google, for example, is just about to establish itself as one on a gargantuan scale. Piratebay, which handles currently an estimated 50% of all bittorent traffic [5], is another one, even if they do not seem to be keen on exploiting this position at the moment. The film is clearly a piece of advocacy, more interested in making a point clearly and strongly, rather than telling a complex and possibly contradictory story. Which is all and well, not the least because it's very transparently so, but still, towards the end of the film, it's pushed right over the messianic edge.

There are more problems. Apart from Elisabeth Eisenstein, there is not a single women in this film, and apart from Lawrence Liang (ALF, Bangalore), all "experts" are European or American (whereas the "kids on the street" are immigrants). Thus, the revolution might be made by pirates, but if they all come from the geographic centers of power, it's not so terribly hard to imagine how they, or their successors, might transition into the institutional centers of power as well.

So, it's perhaps best to watch this film together with another documentary on the subject: "Good Copy, Bad Copy" [6] released earlier this year by Danish film makers. This film has a far more global perspective, introducing two major non-Western cultural communities -- tecno-brega from Brazil and the Nigerian film industry -- as examples of practices who are not encumbered by the copyright conundrum that forces us into such unproductive questions as whether piracy is a good thing or not. Looking at Brazil and Nigeria GCBC suggests that whereas technological change might still originate from the West, but cultural innovation is distributed much more broadly. The two films are really companion pieces, and they even share some footage.

Despite problems, Steal this Film, II deserves the very large audience it's likely to get, given that it's promoted on the front page of PirateBay.org. A space far more valuable than a TV ad for a dvd could ever be. I wonder how long it takes the suits to figure this out.

Steal this Film, Part II, 2007 Length: 0:44:43 by League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others).

[1] http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/

[2] http://www.mininova.org/tor/559767

[3] http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part1/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

[5]http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-torrents-and-peers-double-071225/

[6] http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net

--- http://felix.openflows.com -----------------------------

out now:

*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005

StumbleVideo - Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

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