Recording Surface

I almost never remember my dreams, but last night I had one that not only forced me to wake up but is still haunting me late the next afternoon. It was very short, but very disturbing. (more…)

For the past few years, I haven’t been scouring The New York Times on a daily basis like I used to; mostly now I just skim if I read it all. (Noam Chomsky is surely disappointed in me.) (more…)

Following are some loose threads that didn’t make it into my (poorly executed) post on democracy. These are things that, it seems to me, would need to be folded into critiques/explorations of democracy. They are, for now, notes, very fragmentary and in bullet form. To be developed, hopefully: (more…)

(Following is my contribution to the Long Sunday symposium.)

Seeing as how the contributors so far to the democracy symposium have addressed the current conjuncture, the problems, failures, and relevance of democracy, using more or less contemporary philosophers as their springboards, I feel like a bit of a cornball using a 150-year-old economic text. Anyway, a warning, I guess. (more…)

What I’m reading during my procrastinating:

Absent Signified has a fabulous post about Zidane, sports, racism, and timely headbutts.

The Angry Arab News Service is prolific and passionate in these dark days.

Here’s a scary valorization of Ahmadinejad from someone on the left. I was surprised to learn that Iranian sovereignty, open suppression of women and gays, and theocratic rule are things I should be defending.

What I’m procrastinating from: Putting together my contribution to the hastily convened Long Sunday symposium on democracy, which has already begun with posts by Jodi and John. I will post on Monday.

Israel’s occupies a paradoxical place in the global schema: it’s both a leading laboratory of capitalist experimentation and an anachronism, with its direct (internal) colony and openly racist, two-tier democracy. The “crisis” that led to the severely militarized response charmingly named Summer Rain, and now Operation Just Desserts, is a crisis of the former position, not the latter.

In the late 80s, as the Soviet Union and its satellites were falling, Israel became exemplary of, almost a vanguard for, capital’s postcommunist desire, to simultaneously create open borders for capital and goods flows while fully dictating the movement of people and labor. During the first intifada, and even more so after Oslo, Israel was a neoliberal fantasyland: a state that could literally open and close its borders at will, without repercussions or domestic or international protest. Today, Israel’s task is to devise a solution to the problem facing the U.S. in Iraq: How to both repress and co-opt “the terrorists,” to ensure the unquestioned defeat of outliers while enclosing them within the circuits of capital.

In other words, only stategies have changed from what Deleuze described in 1978 (thanks to Keith for posting this):

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a model that will determine how problems of terrorism will be dealt with with elsewhere, even in Europe. The worldwide cooperation of States, and the worldwide organization of police and criminal proceedings, will necessarily lead to a classification extending to more and more people who will be considered virtual “terrorists.” This situation is analogous to the Spanish Civil War, when Spain served as an experimental laboratory for a far more terrible future.

Today Israel is conducting an experiment. It has invented a model of repression that, once adapted, will profit other countries. There is great continuity in Israeli politics. Israel believes that the U.N. resolutions verbally condemning Israel in fact put it in the right. Israel has transformed the invitation to leave the occupied territories into the right to establish colonies there. It thinks sending an international peace-keeping force into Southern Lebanon is an excellent idea… provided that this force, in the place of Israeli forces, transforms the region into a police zone, a desert of security. This conflict is a curious kind of blackmail, from which the whole world will never escape unless we lobby for the Palestinians to be recognized for what they are: “genuine partners” in peace talks. They are indeed at war, in a war they did not choose.

At Infoshop (via).