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DISCUSSION

FW: information wants to be free


Apologies for cross posting. Interesting text; info is material.

Cm

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2005 10:21:10 +0530
From: Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>
Subject: [Reader-list] FW: Ken Wark's sarai paper - Information wants
to be free (but is everywhere in chains)
To: Sarai <reader-list@sarai.net>
Message-ID: <BE056496.1ED02%db@dannybutt.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

Ken's paper, delivered at the Sarai conference, is below at his request. I'm
not sure how this relates to all the other versions of this manifesto that
exist out there! I wish the dialogue afterward was included, as excellent
points were raised by Nick Dyer-Witheford and Rosemary Coombe, among others.

------ Forwarded Message
From: Ken Wark <warkk@newschool.edu>
Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2005 23:39:54 -0500
Subject: sarai paper

Danny,
could you please forward this to the
sarai-reader list? I'd like people to have
access to the full text as i had to skip
a lot in the presentation. thnx k

Information wants to be free
(but is everywhere in chains)

McKenzie Wark
warkk@newschool.edu

01. Information is a strange thing, as
theologically subtle as the commodity was
to Marx. It has a peculiar ontological
property. Information is never immaterial.
Information cannot not be embodied. It has
no existence outside of the material. It is not
an ideal or a ghost or a spirit. (Although it
may give rise to these as mystifications*)
And yet information's relation to the
material is radically contingent. This
contingency is only now starting to be fully
realized. The coming of the digital is the
realization, in every sense of the word, of
the arbitrary relation between information
and its materiality.

02. Everyday life confirms this. I could
make you a copy of this presentation, and
the information in it, or rather the potential
for information in it, would then be on a cd
in your possession. And yet, it would still
be right here, on my hard drive. Now isn't
that strange? My possession of information
does not deprive you of it. Whatever
information is, it escapes the bounds of any
particular materiality. Information can
escape from scarcity. That is its unique
ontological promise, now fully realizable in
the digital.

03. Information has then at least one very
strange property. It can escape scarcity.
And it is this property that makes it very
troubling for that other kind of property --
private property -- which is all about the
maintenance of scarcity. Information is what
economists call a 'non-rivalrous resource' --
a term that is clearly an oxymoron.
Information poses not only an intellectual
challenge but an historical challenge to
economic thought. The challenge is not only
to think what else it could be, but to
practice the production and reproduction of
information otherwise.

04. Now, I am not a lawyer or a historian,
so I hope you will pardon me for trying to
cut through the complexities to try to
produce the concept. If the point is not only
to interpret the world but to change it, then
there's a role for, shall we say, an artificial
clarity. I am not going to explore the actual
world of intellectual property exhaustively.
I am trying to move on from the actual to
the possible.

05. The new ontological properties that
information introduces into the world bring
forth, as a reaction, new kinds of property
relation in the legal sense -- what we now
call 'intellectual property' -- another
oxymoron. As I would understand it,
intellectual property grows out of, but is
distinct from, patents, copyrights and
trademarks. Intellectual property is the
tendency to turn this socially negotiable
rights into private property rights. The
enormous ramping-up of intellectual
property talk results from the contradiction
between the newly realized potential of
information to escape from scarcity and
those with an interest in stuffing it back into
the limits that scarcity and the commodity
would impose.

06. The ontological property form of
information is as socially produced, as its
legal property form. The question is how
and why these two senses of 'property'
have come into conflict. The question is
why, if "information wants to be free" in
the ontological sense, it is "everywhere in
chains", in the legal sense. Coming from the
Marxist tradition, I can't help but see the
law as superstructural, as reactive, and
most particularly as a terrain upon which
class interests negotiate. In particular, I am
interested in law as a terrain where
successive ruling class interests manage the
transition from one mode of production to
another. This might sound rather 'vulgar',
but perhaps in this case it is the reality of
the situation that is vulgar, not the theory.

07. As Derrida suggests, there are many
'spirits of Marx', all heterogeneous to each
other. There is a French Marx, a German
Marx, and very definitely an Indian Marx.
He mutates and adapts to specific historical
environments. The Marx whose spirit I
want to channel I think of as an English
Marx. This is the Marx who is a reader of
Locke, Hume and Mill. This is the Marx
who studied the Parliamentary Blue Books
on conditions in the factories. And indeed it
might be the Marx who wrote articles for
the Tribune on the destruction of the
Indian cotton industry by British imperial
design. It is the Marx, in short, whose
project is a critique of political economy, and
for whom property is a central category of
thought.

08. There is a very ahistorical notion of
capitalism about these days. For Deleuze
and Guattari, for example, it has always
existed as what the socius or the state
resists. But I think it useful to conceive
instead of three stages of commodity
production, each hinging on a more abstract
construction of the private property form.
Marx is already aware, as a reader of
Ricardo, that commodity production has
two rival forms even in his own times. First
there is its agricultural form, based on
turning land into a form of private
property. Then there is its industrial form --
antagonistic to the first -- based on the
construction of capital as a more fungible,
mutable -- abstract -- form of private
property.

09. If there have already been two stages
to commodity production, why not a third -
- antagonistic to the first and second? I
think what we have now is not 'late
capitalism' or 'information capitalism' or
capitalism 'globalized', but the emergence of
a whole new historical stage of commodity
production, based on transforming
information into a private property right.
Intellectual property emerges -- and quite
recently -- as a new and more abstract form
of property, with which to control the
production process. What we have now --
and I hesitate to use this term -- is a 'post
capitalism', but one that has very definitely
not abolished the question of class.

10. The transformation of land into private
property gave rise to a class relation,
between what I would call farmers and
pastoralists. Pastoralists own land and
extract rent from farmers, who must pay
rent in case out of the proceeds of the sale
of their crops. This is a wholly different
relation than that which held between lords
and peasants, which involved local
traditional rights, payment in kind and so
forth. This is analytically (if not always
historically) the first stage in the commodity
economy.

11. The second stage is the stage of capital,
in which workers find themselves
dispossessed of all but their labor power,
and confront a class of capitalists who own
the means of production. As Kalecki says, in
capitalism, "workers spend what they get
and capitalists get what they spend";
wages, on the one hand, and profits, on the
other. And as Ricardo and Marx were well
aware, capitalists struggled against
pastoralists as much as they struggled
against workers. The historic victory of
capitalists over pastoralists was not
guaranteed, but was certainly aided by the
fact that capital is a more abstract property
form.

12. In our time the privatization of
information gives rise to a new class
relation, based on a third moment of
abstracting the property form. On the one
hand, intellectual property produces what I
call a hacker class, the class of those who
produce new information. They may be
chemists or musicians, programmers or
philosophers. It doesn't matter what place
one occupies in the intellectual division of
labor when all of what we produce is
rendered equivalent by the regime of
intellectual property. On the other hand,
there is what I call a vectoralist class, which
owns the means of realizing the value of
intellectual property. This includes not just
the 'culture industries' but also the drug
companies, agribuisiness, and indeed any
line of business dominated by the
management of a portfolio of trademarks,
patents and copyrights.

13. Where the capitalist class found it useful
for information to remain relatively free, in
the interests of the expansion of production
and consumption as a whole, the vectoralist
class insists in the enforcement of strict
private property rights over information.
One might gauge the relative strengths of
these rival ruling classes by looking at the
state of intellectual property law. One might
gauge the preponderance of capitalist and
vectoralist interest within a given firm by
looking at its policies on the technical and
legal enforcement of intellectual property
law. One might gauge the place in the
development process of a particular country
by the way it responds to the demands
from the overdeveloped world for the
enforcement of international agreements on
these 'rights'. In short: by extending the
logic of class analysis, one can show how,
far from being relegated to the dustbin of
history, class is alive and well in our times,
even if in forms we have hardly begun to
name.

14. We can account for the obsession with
enforcing intellectual property law in class
terms. It is in the interests of an emerging
ruling class. We can account then for the
ideologies of information as property also.
James Boyle suggests that there is a tension
between the idea of maximizing the
'efficiency' of the economy as a whole and
producing 'incentives' for information
creators/owners. To put it crudely, the
shift from the former to the latter is the
shift from capitalist to vectoralist thinking
about the place of information in the
economy, from peripheral to central. But
what is striking is that despite legal and
ideological coercion, information still wants
to be free. Its legal properties clash with its
ontological properties. So on the one hand,
we see increasingly vigorous attempts to
outlaw the free sharing of information; and
on the other, we see the persistence of file
sharing and piracy. How can we account
for this tension?

15. This is the nexus where one might
reinvent a kind of critical theory. A critical
theory is one that thinks in terms not only
of the actual but also of the virtual, the
'possible' in the most material sense. Where
this critical theory might begin is by saying
that perhaps what this tension over
information signifies is that we have finally
found the point where we can escape from
material scarcity, and from all economies of
scarcity. Perhaps we have found the one
domain in which we could realize a certain
'utopian' promise: "to each according to
their needs; from each according to their
abilities." That is what I believe. And I
don't think I am alone. There is, as Marcel
Mauss observed a long time ago, a latent
class instinct that all the products of science
and culture really ought to belong to the
people as something held in common,
indeed as what is what is common. The
public is not trespassing. It does not
recognize the new enclosures of
information within private property as
legitimate.

16. File sharing is a social movement, in all
but name. It rarely announces itself as a
social movement, but then I don't think that
is uncommon. Likewise, I think that the
'trespassing instinct', if you will pardon the
phrase, has been alive and well and
resisting commodification for centuries.
Only now it may finally have found an ally
in the digital means for reproducing
information, so that one's possession of it
can be the possession of all. The technicity
that makes possible the abstraction of
information from its material substrate is
not only calling into being something that
can be captured by regimes of economic
value or legal jurisdiction, but something
that can escape them.

17. Which brings us finally to the hacker
class. If there is a tresspassing instinct that
is alive and well among the people, will the
producers of information as property side
with that people, or with the vectoralist
class? That is the question for our times.
This is what is at stake in the struggle
between the principle that "information
wants to be free", and all that ideological
talk about 'incentives' versus 'efficiencies'
and other attempts to deny the radical
ontological nature of information itself. The
hacker class has a choice to make. Either it
sides with the vectoralist class, or it realizes
that intellectual property does not protect
producers of information, it protects
owners of information. And who -- in the
long run -- comes to own information?
Those who own the means of production,
the means of realizing its value. The
ideological move is to blur this distinction
between producer and owner, when in
reality the hacker, like the worker or the
farmer, has to sell the product of her labor
to those who own the means of realizing its
value.

18. As those of us from the periphery
know: commodification has always been
global. Globalization is nothing new --
except perhaps to those in the
overdeveloped world who have started to
feel the effects of it only lately, with the
breakdown of the Fordist or corporatist
state and its attendant Keynsian class
compromise between capital and labor. But
I think that the rise of the vectoralist class
gives us a handle on the form that the
globalization of the commodity form took in
the late 20th century.

19. It is the vectoralist class that produces
the means of establishing a global division
of labor. It develops the vectoral
production process, where information is
separated from its material embodiment,
thus allowing the materiality of production
to be spatially separated from the
information that governs its form. And so
we end up with a new global division of
labor, in which the old capitalist firms of the
overdeveloped world mutate into
vectoralist firms by shedding their
productive capacity. Manufacturing
becomes the specialty of the
underdeveloped world; the overdeveloped
world manages the brands, husbands the
patents and enforces the copyrights.
Unequal exchange is no longer between a
capitalist economy in the north and a
pastoralist economy in the south; it is
between a vectoralist economy in the north
and a capitalist economy in the south. But
the vectoral goes one better: it scrambles
the once relatively homogenous economic
spaces within various nation states. One can
find the underdeveloped world now in
Mississippi, and the overdeveloped world
in Bangalore.

20. This process is complex and
contradictory. The paradox of our times is
that both the privatization of information,
and the expansion of an informal commons,
are happening at the same time. What might
give us hope is the very fragility of the
vectoralist position, which runs counter to
the ontological properties of information
itself, and can only protect its interests by a
massive ramping up of the level of legal
coercion. Where land lends itself to 'natural
monopoly' and the extraction of rents, this
gets harder and harder as property
becomes more and more abstract. And now
we arrive at the very brittle monopolies of
the vectoral economy. The very means of
producing and reproducing information
that it creates are the forces of its own
undoing.

21. There is an alternative model to both
the absolute commodification of information
and its piracy. (Piracy, after all, is merely
the reversal of Proudhon's dictum
"property is theft" -- it makes theft
property.) The alternative is the gift
economy. As John Frow has argued, rather
than the gift being a pure, ideal and
harmonious state existing prior to the
commodity, it is the commodity's necessary
double. But I think that the coming of the
digital opens up a new possibility for the
gift to distance itself from the commodity.
What one can create, on the internet, for
example, is the abstract gift relation. If the
traditional gift always involved a giver and
a receiver who are known to each other,
who obligate each other, the abstract gift
involves no such particular obligation. When
one gives information within the networks,
the obligation one invokes is something
common, not something particular. One
invokes the gift as something abstract.

22. This seems to me to point towards an
ethics -- a hacker ethics -- and also a hacker
politics. If critical theory is to resist
becoming merely hypocritical theory, it has
to engage with its own means of
production and distribution. A hacker
politics is one of participating in, and
endeavoring to create, both technically and
culturally, abstract gift relations, within
which information can not only want to be
free, but can become free. Rather than
advocate for the public against the private,
it seems to me that information is a point
that offers at least two other possibilities. In
the spirit of Derrida, one might deconstruct
it; in the spirit of Deleuze, one might escape
it. One might approach what Nick Dyer-
Witheford calls "a new commonwealth of
species being." But as Marx says in the
Manifesto -- the forces for change in any
social movement are those who ask "the
property question."

McKenzie Wark ~~~~~~~A Hacker Manifesto
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/

------ End of Forwarded Message

------------------------------

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End of reader-list Digest, Vol 18, Issue 8
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------ End of Forwarded Message

DISCUSSION

NYTimes.com Article: Hearts and Minds: Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena


The article below from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by christina112@earthlink.net.

Annals of Global Media, chapter oyvey:

christina112@earthlink.net

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Hearts and Minds: Pentagon Weighs Use of Deception in a Broad Arena

December 13, 2004
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 - The Pentagon is engaged in bitter,
high-level debate over how far it can and should go in
managing or manipulating information to influence opinion
abroad, senior Defense Department civilians and military
officers say.

Such missions, if approved, could take the deceptive
techniques endorsed for use on the battlefield to confuse
an adversary and adopt them for covert propaganda campaigns
aimed at neutral and even allied nations.

Critics of the proposals say such deceptive missions could
shatter the Pentagon's credibility, leaving the American
public and a world audience skeptical of anything the
Defense Department and military say - a repeat of the
credibility gap that roiled America during the Vietnam War.

The efforts under consideration risk blurring the
traditional lines between public affairs programs in the
Pentagon and military branches - whose charters call for
giving truthful information to the media and the public -
and the world of combat information campaigns or
psychological operations.

The question is whether the Pentagon and military should
undertake an official program that uses disinformation to
shape perceptions abroad. But in a modern world wired by
satellite television and the Internet, any misleading
information and falsehoods could easily be repeated by
American news outlets.

The military has faced these tough issues before. Nearly
three years ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld,
under intense criticism, closed the Pentagon's Office of
Strategic Influence, a short-lived operation to provide
news items, possibly including false ones, to foreign
journalists in an effort to influence overseas opinion.

Now, critics say, some of the proposals of that discredited
office are quietly being resurrected elsewhere in the
military and in the Pentagon.

Pentagon and military officials directly involved in the
debate say that such a secret propaganda program, for
example, could include planting news stories in the foreign
press or creating false documents and Web sites translated
into Arabic as an effort to discredit and undermine the
influence of mosques and religious schools that preach
anti-American principles.

Some of those are in the Middle Eastern and South Asian
countries like Pakistan, still considered a haven for
operatives of Al Qaeda. But such a campaign could reach
even to allied countries like Germany, for example, where
some mosques have become crucibles for Islamic militancy
and anti-Americanism.

Before the invasion of Iraq, the military's vast
electronic-warfare arsenal was used to single out certain
members of Saddam Hussein's inner circle with e-mail
messages and cellphone calls in an effort to sway them to
the American cause. Arguments have been made for similar
efforts to be mounted at leadership circles in other
nations where the United States is not at war.

During the cold war, American intelligence agencies had
journalists on their payrolls or operatives posing as
journalists, particularly in Western Europe, with the aim
of producing pro-American articles to influence the
populations of those countries. But officials say that no
one is considering using such tactics now.

Suspicions about disinformation programs also arose in the
1980's when the White House was accused of using such a
campaign to destabilize Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.

In the current debate, it is unclear how far along the
other programs are or to what extent they are being carried
out because of their largely classified nature.

Within the Pentagon, some of the military's most powerful
figures have expressed concerns at some of the steps taken
that risk blurring the traditional lines between public
affairs and the world of combat information operations.

These tensions were cast into stark relief this summer in
Iraq when Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in
Iraq, approved the combining of the command's day-to-day
public affairs operations with combat psychological and
information operations into a single "strategic
communications office."

In a rare expression of senior-level questions about such
decisions, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, issued a memorandum warning the military's
regional combat commanders about the risks of mingling the
military public affairs too closely with information
operations.

"While organizations may be inclined to create physically
integrated P.A./I.O. offices, such organizational
constructs have the potential to compromise the commander's
credibility with the media and the public," it said.

But General Myers's memorandum is not being followed,
according to officers in Iraq, largely because commanders
there believe they are safely separating the two operations
and say they need all the flexibility possible to combat
the insurgency.

Indeed, senior military officials in Washington say public
affairs officers in war zones might, by choice or under
pressure, issue statements to world news media that, while
having elements of truth, are clearly devised primarily to
provoke a response from the enemy.

Administration officials say they are increasingly troubled
that a nation that can so successfully market its cars and
colas around the world, even to foreigners hostile to
American policies, is failing to sell its democratic
ideals, even as the insurgents they are battling are
spreading falsehoods over mass media outlets like the Arab
news satellite channel Al Jazeera.

"In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is
clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the
general public, our job is not perception management but to
counter the enemy's perception management," said the chief
Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita.

The battle lines in this debate have been drawn in a flurry
of classified studies, secret operational guidance
statements and internal requests from Mr. Rumsfeld. Some go
to the concepts of information warfare, and some complain
about how the government's communications are organized.

The fervent debate today is focused most directly on a
secret order signed by Mr. Rumsfeld late last year and
called "Information Operations Roadmap." The 74-page
directive, which remains classified but was described by
officials who had read it, accelerated "a plan to advance
the goal of information operations as a core military
competency."

Noting the complexities and risks, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered
studies to clarify the appropriate relationship between
Pentagon and military public affairs - whose job is to
educate and inform the public with accurate and timely
information - and the practitioners of secret psychological
operations and information campaigns to influence, deter or
confuse adversaries.

In response, one far-reaching study conducted at the
request of the strategic plans and policy branch of the
military's Joint Staff recently produced a proposal to
create a "director of central information." The director
would have responsibility for budgeting and "authoritative
control of messages" - whether public or covert - across
all the government operations that deal with national
security and foreign policy.

The study, conducted by the National Defense University,
was presented Oct. 20 to a panel of senior Pentagon
officials and military officers, including Douglas J.
Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, whose
organization set up the original Office of Strategic
Influence.

No senior officer today better represents the debate over a
changing world of military information than Brig. Gen. Mark
Kimmitt, an operational commander chosen to be the
military's senior spokesman in Iraq after major combat
operations shifted to counterinsurgency operations in the
spring of 2003.

His role rankled many in the military's public affairs
community who contend that the job should have gone to
someone trained in the doctrine of Army communications and
public affairs, rather than to an officer who had spent his
career in combat arms.

"This is tough business," said General Kimmitt, who now
serves as deputy director of plans for the American
military command in the Middle East. "Are we trying to
inform? Yes. Do we offer perspective? Yes. Do we offer
military judgment? Yes. Must we tell the truth to stay
credible? Yes. Is there a battlefield value in deceiving
the enemy? Yes. Do we intentionally deceive the American
people? No."

The rub, General Kimmitt said, is operating among those
sometimes conflicting principles.

"There is a gray area," he said. "Tactical and operational
deception are proper and legal on the battlefield." But "in
a worldwide media environment," he asked, "how do you
prevent that deception from spilling out from the
battlefield and inadvertently deceiving the American
people?"

Mr. Di Rita said the scope of the issue had changed in
recent years. "We have a unique challenge in this
department," he said, "because four-star military officers
are the face of the United States abroad in ways that are
almost unprecedented since the end of World War II."

He added, "Communication is becoming a capability that
combatant commanders have to factor in to the kinds of
operations they are doing."

Much of the Pentagon's work in this new area falls under a
relatively unknown field called Defense Support for Public
Diplomacy. This new phrase is used to describe the
Pentagon's work in governmentwide efforts to communicate
with foreign audiences but that is separate from support
for generals in the field.

At the Pentagon, that effort is managed by Ryan Henry, Mr.
Feith's principal deputy for policy.

"With the pace of technology and such, and with the nature
of the global war on terrorism, information has become much
more a part of strategic victory, and to a certain extent
tactical victory, than it ever was in the past," Mr. Henry
said.

However, a senior military officer said that without clear
guidance from the Pentagon, the military's psychological
operations, information operations and public affairs
programs are "coming together on the battlefield like never
before, and as such, the lines are blurred." This has led
to a situation where "proponents of these elements jockey
for position to lead the overall communication effort," the
officer said.

Debate also continues over proposed amendments to a
classified Defense Department directive, titled "3600.1:
Information Operations," which would lay down Pentagon
policy in coming years. Previous versions of the directive
allow aggressive information campaigns to affect enemy
leaders, but not those of allies or even neutral states.
The current debate is over proposed revisions that would
widen the target audience for such missions.

Mr. Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman, says that even though
the government is wrestling with these issues, the standard
is still to tell to the truth.

"Our job is to put out information to the public that is
accurate," he said, "and to put it out as quickly as we
can."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/politics/13info.html?ex03929324&ei=1&enbc9ba707f5d2a9

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DISCUSSION

Fatal detraction


Caught a chill from nettime: about

> inability to view the world according to abstract principles, to transcend
> the literally militant passages of sacred texts.

> <http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id0005855>
>
>
>
>
> OpinionJournal - TASTE COMMENTARY
>
> Fatal Detraction
> A provocative, and offensive, filmmaker and columnist attacks Islam and
> pays with his life.
>
> BY LEON DE WINTER
> Friday, November 5, 2004 12:01 a.m.
>
> AMSTERDAM--It was only two years ago that an animal-rights extremist
> assassinated the populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, explaining later in
> court that he did so, in part, to stop Fortuyn from using Muslim immigrants
> as "scapegoats." Now the Netherlands is once again in shock. On Tuesday,
> the filmmaker and newspaper columnist Theo van Gogh--a distant descendant
> of the artist Vincent--was murdered, allegedly by a Muslim immigrant (now
> in police custody). On Wednesday the police arrested eight Islamic radicals
> in connection with the slaying. The Netherlands prides itself on being a
> liberal and tolerant country. What is going on?
>
> Like Mr. Fortuyn, whom he admired, Mr. Van Gogh was a radical libertarian,
> a champion of free speech who refused to be constrained by taboos or social
> codes. I know from personal experience what it felt like to be the target
> of his invective.
>
> Mr. Van Gogh's pen could be vulgar and radical, and he managed to offend me
> more than once. In 1984, after I directed a feature film called
> "Frontiers," about a Dutch journalist who goes abroad to interview a
> terrorist and discovers his own violent side, Mr. Van Gogh accused me of
> "selling out my Jewish identity," although there was not a single Jewish
> character in the picture. Writing elsewhere about Jewish writers or
> filmmakers, he made Holocaust-tinged jokes like: "Hey, it smells like
> caramel today--well then, they must be burning the diabetic Jews." Such
> attacks went on for almost 20 years. (Mr. Van Gogh was 47 when he died.)
>
> To be clear: Mr. Van Gogh did not limit himself to Jewish topics. He
> attacked Christian values and symbols as well. Theodor Holman, another
> Dutch columnist, once wrote that "every Christian is a criminal," and a
> storm of controversy broke out. Mr. Van Gogh came to his defense by writing
> that people offended by those words were only "the fan club of that rotting
> fish in Nazareth." After viewing Mel Gibson's recent film, Mr. Van Gogh
> remarked in the daily Metro: "I just went to see 'The Passion of the
> Christ,' a film as bad as an LSD trip which shows once again that also in
> the sewers of Christianity collective daftness just leads to mud."
>
> After the death of Mr. Fortuyn, who warned that Holland's open culture
> would clash with its growing Muslim community, Mr. Van Gogh turned his
> attention to Islam, spewing invective in his columns and earning many
> enemies. Many people went out of their way to avoid him, including me.
>
> Even so, Mr. Van Gogh remained a member of the artistic establishment. He
> worked for the leading Dutch television companies, for newspapers and
> magazines. In August he caused a sensation by collaborating with Ayaan
> Hirsi Ali, a Somali who fled to Holland 10 years ago and who eventually won
> a seat in Parliament. Two years ago, Ms. Hirsi Ali declared that she no
> longer considered herself a Muslim. Death threats followed, and she was
> given round-the-clock protection by the Dutch secret service. Certain
> segments of the public hailed her as the true heir of Mr. Fortuyn. She
> certainly has a charismatic persona: She is black, beautiful and
> elegant--and knows Islam inside-out.
>
> It was the film that Mr. Van Gogh and Ms. Hirsi Ali made,
> "Submission"--the title is a literal translation of the Arabic word
> "Islam"--that appears to have led to Van Gogh's murder. In his 20-minute
> movie, based on Ms. Hirsi Ali's script and screened on television in
> August, Mr. Van Gogh portrayed written passages from the Koran on partially
> clothed female bodies to accentuate the texts' hostility to women. The
> intention, of course, was to provoke a discussion among female Muslims.
>
> And provocative the film was, but in the context of Holland's often brazen
> filmmaking culture it was reasonably cautious and subtle. In fact, it led
> me for the first time to write something positive about Mr. Van Gogh. I
> thought the negative reaction to "Submission" was unfair. In Elsevier
> magazine I wrote that the "people who are offended by this film have a big
> problem." I noted that it did not openly show naked women--as so many
> critics had claimed--and that it was rather modest in its style, subdued
> and carefully made.
>
> In his own statements, Mr. Van Gogh made no concessions to the
> sensibilities of Holland's Muslim immigrants. He was an artiste
> provocateur--troublesome, offensive and hyperbolic but, it should be said,
> accepted within the wide boundaries of Dutch culture.
>
> But not by everyone. On Tuesday, a 26-year-old observant Muslim named
> Mohammed B. (officials are withholding his family name) decided to act,
> unable to accept that unbelievers like Mr. Van Gogh might be led to
> criticize or ridicule Islam. The son of immigrants who had found work,
> prosperity and freedom in the Netherlands, he had a history of violence
> and, it now appears, was allied with a group of radical Muslims.
>
> Having shot Mr. Van Gogh while the filmmaker was riding his bicycle, and
> clutching a knife in both hands, Mohammed B. tried to cut off Van Gogh's
> head--"as if he were slicing bread," as one eyewitness related. For the
> deed, he had dressed himself in traditional Moroccan garb and, it seems,
> attempted to ritually slaughter the infidel, like an animal. He stuck a
> note on Van Gogh's chest with a knife.
>
> The minister of justice announced yesterday that the note was a letter
> addressed to Ms. Hirsi Ali, threatening her and filled with threats and
> anti-Semitic remarks. The letter, he noted, "shows an extreme religious
> ideology; it says that its enemies should fear for their lives." The
> minister of the interior, for his part, remarked that the letter was "a
> direct attack on the Dutch democratic system."
>
> And so it seems to be. In a strange and appalling way, Mohammed B. did to
> Mr. Van Gogh what Mr. Van Gogh did to the actresses and extras in
> "Submission"--the essential difference being that the actresses could wash
> the words away and leave the studio without a care, while the words on Mr.
> Van Gogh were pinned by his murderer to his dead flesh.
>
> This difference highlights what many in the Netherlands see as an enormous
> problem with the fundamentalist parts of Arab-Islamic cultures: an
> inability to view the world according to abstract principles, to transcend
> the literally militant passages of sacred texts. To some, the Koran to this
> day offers no prospect of a free interpretation, or a tolerant one, that
> can exist alongside the free speech of a liberal society.
>
> In the heyday of their multicultural utopia, the Dutch political and
> intellectual elites believed that radical Muslims and radical libertarians
> could exist peacefully together in the same society. In recent years it has
> become clear that such a belief was an illusion, although the politically
> correct media long tried to avoid the whole subject.
>
> Mr. Fortuyn, in his outspoken political career, broke the taboos
> surrounding the problems of immigration and paid with his life. Mr. Van
> Gogh paid the same price for a provocation that, had it been directed at
> Christianity rather than Islam, would have hardly raised an eyebrow.
>
> Mr. de Winter is a Dutch novelist and adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.
--
soundart performance videoinstallation multimedia painting theory

<www.christinamcphee.net>
<www.naxsmash.net>
<www.naxsmash.net/inscapes>

DISCUSSION

LOCATION!LOCATION!LOCATION!November 10 at the Exploratorium SF


YLEM Forum:
LOCATION!LOCATION!LOCATION!
Three Projects in Locative Media by California Artists

Wednesday, November 10, 7:30 pm
McBean Theater, Exploratorium
3501 Lyon St.
San Francisco, CA 94123
Free, Open to the public and wheelchair accessible

<http://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/directions.html>

PROGRAM

1 Slipstreamkonza:Autochamber

<http://www.christinamcphee.net/slipkonza/autochamber.html>

Christina McPhee with sound collaboration by Henry Warwick

Slipstreamkonza is a sonic topology that remediates carbon absorption and
release data from the tallgrass prairie. Autochamber is a sound prototype
that interprets data from an active climatologic research site using
locative robotic sound within an conceptual practice following the historic
HPSCHD by Lejaren Hiller and John Cage. Christina McPhee's new work from
the series Strike/Slip/Merz_city will open at Transport Gallery in LA in
March-April 2005 <http://www.transportgallery.com/transport/. Composer Henry
Warwick, at home in digital imaging and electronic sound, develops data/
sound topologies. He produced the San Francisco Performance Cinema Symposium
(2003) and makes work about the interface of catastrophy and technology. He
is a board member of YLEM (<http:/www.ylem.org>)

2 Remote Location 1:100,000

http://www.paintersflat.net/remotelocation.html

Paula Poole and Brett Stalbaum

Created during August 2004, Box Elder County, Utah, Remote Location
1:100,000 binds together data about landscape and the landscape as data,
using GPS influenced tiles, soil samples, paintings and photo documentation.
The project is sponsored by the Center for Land Use Interpretation
(<http://www.clui.org>) Paula Poole is adapting landscape painting
traditions to new media. She centers on the landscape of the Great Basin
desert of North America. Brett Stalbaum is
a C5 research theorist and software development artist. He cofounded
Electronic Disturbance Theater and collaborates with Paula Poole on
land/walking/GPS/locative/performance/pictorial works.

3 "34 north 118 west"

http://34N118W.net/

Jeremy Hight, Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman

"34 north 118 west" uses gps data and interactive map that triggers live
data through movement in downtown Los Angeles. "34 north 118 west" won the
grand jury prize at the Los Angeles based Art in Motion Festival, Aim IV,
in 2003 <http://www.usc.edu/dept/matrix/aim/aimIV/> Jeremy Hight is
a writer fascinated by the weather <http://thepharmakon.org/RightAsRain/>
and 'agitated space'. Naomi Spellman works in locative media, networked
narrative, and was Artist in Residence at the Media Centre, Huddersfield,
U.K.,<http://project_diary.blogspot.com/ last summer. Jeff Knowlton's "A
text for the navigational age", showed at VRML Art 2000 and Siggraph2000.
Also at Huddersfield, UK, Jeff has worked with Naomi to design an
'interpretive engine' for various places on earth, which uses wireless
APs in New York to determine more generalised location. Its debut was in
October 2004 at Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City, NYC
http://www.spectropolis.info/

<http://www.ylem.org/>