Inception Prologue - The Cobol Job

As a final teaser before the Cardiff sciSCREEN showing of Inception, 5.45 this Friday at Chapter Arts Centre, we'll direct you to the comic book prologue for Inception.

The Cobol Job

While you can download it as a .pdf file, it is perhaps best viewed on the web using the snazzy webcomic reader that simulates the way comic books are read. Many webcomics are a series of disconnected panels. This reader moves across the page from panel to panel. It doesn't quite capture the way in which you can take in images from across a two-page spread while reading each panel in sequential order, but it is the best attempt I have yet seen on the web.

The screening of Inception is sponsored by the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute. The speakers will be:

• Professor Mark Blagrove
  School of Human Sciences, Swansea University
• Professor Ken Peattie
  ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), Cardiff University
• Professor Alessandra Tanesini
  School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
• Dr Robin Smith
  Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), Cardiff University

Their discussions will use this film to explore the psychology of lucid dreaming, business ethics and intellectual property, representations of urban environments, and the ownership of mental states.

Advance tickets (£6) can be purchased from Chapter, via the website, or over the phone (02920 304400).

manifesto of the 130

Open Letter to French President Nicolas Sarkozy

16 August 2001

published in Libération

The French government has indicated that it is pursuing possible legal action against the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti (CRIME) over a Yes Men-inspired announcement last Bastille Day pledging that France would pay Haiti restitution.

We believe the ideals of equality, fraternity and liberty would be far better served if, instead of pouring public resources into the prosecution of these pranksters, France were to start paying Haiti back for the 90 million gold francs that were extorted following Haitian independence.

This “independence debt,” which is today valued at well over the 17 billion euros pledged in the fake announcement last July 14, illegitimately forced a people who had won their independence in a successful slave revolt, to pay again for their freedom. Imposed under threat of military invasion and the restoration of slavery by French King Charles X, to compensate former colonial slave-owners for lost “property” (including the slaves who had won their freedom and independence when they defeated Napoleon’s armies), this indemnity burdened generations of Haitians with an illegitimate debt, which they were still paying right up until 1947.

France is not the only country that owes a debt to Haiti. After 1947, Haiti incurred debt to commercial banks and international financial institutions under the Duvalier dictatorships, who stole billions from the public treasury. The basic needs and development aspirations of generations of Haitians were sacrificed to pay back these debts. Granting Haiti the status of Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) and canceling part of the current debt only begins to reverse the financial damage done by these recent debts. More recently, in 2000, Inter-American Development Bank loans of $150 million for basic infrastructure were illegally blocked by the US government as a means of political pressure. This also did measurable economic and human damage. Each of these institutions and governments should be responsible for the harm they did to Haiti's society and economy.

In 2003, when the Haitian government demanded repayment of the money France had extorted from Haiti, the French government responded by helping to overthrow that government. Today, the French government responds to the same demand by CRIME by threatening legal action. These are inappropriate responses to a demand that is morally, economically, and legally unassailable. In light of the urgent financial need in the country in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, we urge you to pay Haiti, the world’s first black republic, the restitution it is due.

Tariq Ali, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Albert, Pierre Alferi, Jean-Claude Amara, Kevin B Anderson, Roger Annis, Anthony Arnove, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Nnimmo Bassey, Rosalyn Baxandall, Pierre Beaudet, Dan Beeton, Walden Bello,Medea Benjamin, Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonnano, Serge Bouchereau, Myriam Bourgy, Houria Bouteldja, José Bové, Leslie Cagan, Aldrin Calixte, Ellen Cantarow, Camille Chalmers, Noam Chomsky, Stefan Christoff, Jeff Cohen, Jim Cohen, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Brian Concannon, Raphaël Confiant, Mike Davis, Warren Davis, Nick Dearden, Rokhaya Diallo, Christine Delphy, Rea Dol, Ariel Dorfman, Stephen Duncombe, Berthony Dupont, Ben Ehrenreich, Joe Emersberger, Yves Engler, Eric Fassin, Dianne Feeley, John Feffer, Anthony Fenton, Bill Fletcher, Jr., Eduardo Galeano, Grazia Ietto-Gillies, Greg Grandin, Arun Gupta, Peter Hallward, Hamé, Hammond, Thomas Harrison, Helene Hazera, John Hilary, HK, Doug Ireland, Kim Ives, Olatunde Johnson, Eva Joly, Mario Joseph, Mathieu Kassovitz, Robin D. G. Kelley, Richard Kim, Amir Khadir, Sadri Khiari, Naomi Klein, Pierre Labossiere, Joanne Landy, Fanfan Latour, Charles Laurence, Jesse Lemisch, Reed Lindsay, Pauline Londeix, Isabel Macdonald, Christian Mahieux, Henri Maler,Noël Mamère, Betty Reid Mandell, Marvin Mandell, Jerome Martin, John G. Mason, Gustave Massiah, Georgina Murray, Cyril Mychalejko, Robert Naiman, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Bernard Noël, Derrick O'Keefe, Karen Orenstein, Rosalind Petchesky, Wadner Pierre, Kevin Pina, Justin Podur, Serge Quadruppani, Adam Ramsay, Jacques Rancière, Judy Rebick, William I. Robinson, Pierre Rousset, Stephen R. Shalom, Bobbi Siegelbaum, Steve Siegelbaum, Fanny Simon, Eyal Sivan, Ashley Smith, Jeb Sprague, Louis-Georges Tin, Cornel West, Howard Winant, Cécile Winter, Lawrence Wittner, Marie Yared, Nick Nesbitt, Melanie Newton

Viral Marketing - blurring fact and fiction

To whet your appetites for the Cardiff sciSCREEN showing of Inception on the Friday 27th August, here is a viral marketing trailer in which Christopher Nolan discusses dream research with a couple of dream researchers and a few actors in-role.



Advance tickets (£6) can be purchased from Chapter, via the website, or over the phone (02920 304400).

after the occupation

Middlesex, the Morning After

by "Joe Jack-Toe"

Since my post to Scurvy Tunes back in May (“The Struggle at Middlesex,” 14 May 2010), much has happened in the conflict between staff/students and management over closure of philosophy programmes at Middlesex University, and all in all the outcome has not been good.

The students occupying University buildings were served a writ and evicted. Further protests and occupations met with heavy-handed opposition from the management, who suspended staff and students for their involvement, and launched what was essentially a smear campaign claiming that the students had “broken bones” of a member of security staff during the occupation (something patently untrue). Several staff who sent public emails criticising management through the University email system were disciplined. On 28th May, the (sluggish) lecturer’s union (UCU) finally got involved, issuing an ultimatum to management to lift the staff suspensions or go into formal dispute. On 2nd June this dispute was declared, but on 8th June the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy announced that it had done a deal to move to Kingston University on the other side of London, effectively robbing the campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex of its gathering momentum.

    

To call this rescue of the centre a merely a “partial victory” (as CRMEP’s statement did) is rather an understatement of just how slim the achievement was. The good news about the outcome was that CRMEP, and its excellent and valuable work in the study of traditions of European and radical thought can continue, and this is, in the end, something to cheer for.

    

However, the form in which it has been saved is a much reduced one: only postgraduate teaching and research and no undergraduate programmes will move to Kingston; furthermore, two members of staff from the department have not been included in the deal, and now face an uncertain future of redundancy or redeployment. Had the management at Middlesex proposed such an outcome (job losses and axing of programmes) the reaction would have been indignation. In effect CRMEP have acceded willingly to a programme of “rationalisation” and downsizing of the sort that we should be vigorously resisting as damaging to the nature of education and to the rights of people to receive an education (and not just job training). Moreover, once the current BA students have finished their courses, there will be no philosophy at Middlesex University: the very thing which we fought against has now come about.

    

What the staff at CRMEP have done is understandable and the inevitable result of a rationality which is forced on them – both in terms of their individual careers, and (to view the matter a little more generously) in terms of their commitment to the continuation of a key institution in the dissemination of radical continental thought within Anglophone academic discourse. However, for the undergraduate students, and for other staff in the humanities at Middlesex it feels like something of a betrayal (especially to the undergraduate students who have placed their futures on the line by protesting, and the academic staff who have been picked out to be disciplined for their open criticism of management).

    

The students’ brilliant campaign – largely using “web 2.0” technologies – to save the department caused a storm of controversy, with a petition drawing over 18,500 signatures and a Facebook site with over 14,000 members. On the back of this, the international outcry of academic superstars raised coverage not only in the blogosphere but the national press. Shortly before the CRMEP announcement the management were beginning to look profoundly discomforted by all this negative publicity and cracks between the positions of different senior staff seemed to be opening up. (As Bruce Lee says in Enter the Dragon: “The enemy has only images and illusions… Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.” Debord could hardly have put it differently.) 

    

The success of this campaign, and the prestige of the Philosophy department offered a rallying point to those of us worried about the wider general tendencies within the University (and HE more generally) of which this was so obviously symptomatic - tendencies to cut humanities subjects, to yoke education to the vocational, to transform it from a right into a commodity and to subject it to calculations of profit so narrow as to make them almost arbitrary. The highly visible campaign was a battle within a larger struggle within the University, and CRMEP’s retreat to Kingston leaves those in other vulnerable (and less prestigious) areas feeling as if the rug on which their opposition was able to stand has been pulled out from beneath their feet. When smaller, less “important” departments are picked off in future, it will be much harder to mount a campaign against such cuts than in this case.

    

What also emerged clearly into the light of day in the controversies around philosophy were the highly irregular and arbitrary ways in which power is exercised in Middlesex: the general lack of accountability or safeguard procedures within the University and also the ability of management to ride roughshod over what few safety checks and balances there are. The decisions made over philosophy opened an opportunity to challenge these systems and procedures to which all of us are subject. The flight of the department means they will now be hard to challenge.

    

This lack of accountability may be a contributory factor as to why the protests at Middlesex have been so much less successful than in other recent cases in other Universities. (In older Universities, decisions to close down courses may need to go through an academic Senate, for example. A look through the biographies of the Board of Governors at Middlesex is also informative: they are all heavily invested in the marketisation of education.)

    

The management had other advantages at Middlesex. As a multi-campus University, the staff at Middlesex are more than usually dispersed and isolated. Divide and conquer has long been the order of the day: other departments that have been closed in the recent past have gone with hardly a splash in the consciousness of others, who are looking only after their own patch. Management at Middlesex, furthermore, have a stranglehold over the use of the University’s email systems so that only “official” emails can be sent globally to all staff. Many thus knew nothing, little, or only what management told them about the dispute. Perhaps the management at Middlesex were also just smart in the choice of when to announce the closure: at the end of a term, when staff were finishing teaching, and preparing to disappear to pursue the research projects which have increasingly been squeezed into Summer months by increasing teaching loads. This made organization (and industrial action) difficult.

    

The background of a lack of solidarity was exacerbated by the weakness of the Union. In spite of strong feelings from the membership, UCU officials seemed loathe to get involved in the dispute – partly, I think, because they are invested in a system of everyday local bargaining over small issues, and were slow to recognise this as a matter of a crisis rather than business as usual. Arthur Husk, the Branch Chair, talked of avoiding an “equal and opposite” reaction from the University administration, and voiced a belief that management was ready to negotiate as soon as they could without loosing face. This placatory attitude meant that Union involvement was slow to come. Perhaps if it had come sooner, it would have forced the matter to some kind of resolution before the move to Kingston was announced. Union caution is, however, understandable, with the general weakness of Unions under current legislation in the UK. In a recent ruling on a dispute in the HE sector, for example, a precedent was set upholding the right of employers to withhold all pay for even the smallest withdrawal of labour, as with “industrial action short of a strike.” The Student Union was even less involved. But then, when the SU proclaimed support of a sit-in on the art and design campus back in 1989, they were held liable for damages and were still paying the University back many years later.

    

All in all, this has been something of a gloomy picture I have painted. But are there grounds for hope too? What positive lessons can be learned from the Middlesex philosophy fiasco? First, off, of course, one of the achievements of the campaign is the rescue of CRMEP - perhaps without the strong campaign, this could not have been achieved, or would have been achieved on even less favourable terms.

    

Second, the creativity and energy of the students’ campaign is also to be praised, and stands as a positive model. Their technologically savvy but also grassroots strategies (drawing on the legacy of 1968 and the anti-globalization movements) were highly effective in drawing support and publicity, hitting the University in its most sensitive area, which is to say: its public image. During occupation, University buildings were transformed into temporary autonomous zones of creation, critique and festival: they were, that is to say, exactly what a University should always be…

    

Finally, even if Middlesex faces the inevitability of further rounds of cuts, and now without a philosophy department, so with an altogether less lively academic culture for that, I hope that what the campaign has brought about is an increased awareness amongst staff and students in the University of the threat hanging over them, of the need to take collective action (rather than minding their own patch), and of the possibilities of campaign. It was Rosa Luxemburg who saw the revolutionary defeats of the present and the past as preparing the ground for a future victory. I can only hope that the experience of increased solidarity which gathered around the Save Middlesex Philosophy Campaign, and the network of contacts with campaigners in similar situations in other Universities will remain resources in the coming months.

    

And in any case, is the campaign really over? Talking to some of its campaigners, they told me that they had suspended the campaign over Summer, but were looking to begin it once more when term starts again, with the aim of re-establishing a philosophy course at Middlesex, and with the aim of challenging the processes through which the courses were closed. Save Middlesex Philosophy may grow into a “Save Middlesex” campaign per se, just one cog in a larger machine of protest against the current policies of the marketisation of education and everything that this entails.

against forgetting

"Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it 'the way it really was.' It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to hold fast to that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger. The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious."

Walter Benjamin, "On the Concept of History" (1940), thesis VI.

It's a struggle - to remember the victims, to mourn and ask again what is to be done. To denounce the criminals and their crimes, refuse the unceasing invitations to their victory celebrations, their false reconciliations and commanded identities.

Genocidal techno-power is no accident. It is an appearance-form of a master logic: the unfolding of a global social process, capitalist modernity and its proliferating antagonisms, the sequential crystallizations of the social force field, its relations and tendencies.

The moments and turns of class struggle on a global scale, the hot house of racing accumulation and imperialist rivalry, the emergency mutations of the capitalist state, administration and integration, the use and normalization of terror - in a word, enforcement.

Now, this year, the spectacle announces, "the world" will commemorate Hiroshima Day. And for the first time, an official US envoy will "attend" ceremonies in the city destroyed by the first use of nuclear WMDs on this day 65 years ago.

What is the meaning of this "envoy" and this "attendance"? Does it announce that the perpetrating state will now express some form of official regret or apology? No. And what if it did? The only statement that would not be another dissembling victory of conformism would be a the speech of serious acts and measures toward disarmament and nuclear abolition.

Instead, the official rhetoric in this direction is covering a massive increase in US spending on the nuclear arsenals: 'modernization' processes that will lock in these WMDs and the US state's continuing dependence on them for another half-century.

The struggle against forgetting is waged from the bottom up. It has nothing to do with the official commemoration of states or the pseudo-critical mouthing of national stains. The work of this struggle is ours to do, with hell hounds at our heels.

GR

day of infamy

Guerrilla street theater by the Carnival of Democracy Players, Sarasota, Florida, 6 August 2001.

Photos by Gaby.

ghost sited

Greg Sholette sends this snapshot from his Return of the Atomic Ghosts project.