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Hi, attched you will find a text i wrote about the Feb 15th demos. Its a little anachronistic, perhaps, but i hope some of its insights remain relevant. Yates Mckee [[*this text was composed in early March. While in some respects anachronistic, I hope it will in some ways remain relevant as the global anti-war movement continues to grow.]] Cosmopolitics on What Grounds? Notes on February 15th and the (Un)securing of the World Picture (draft) By Yates Mckee Allowing [the protests] to influence me would be like saying I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security of the people. --George W. Bush Who is the global people? It seems impossible today to grasp the people as a political subject and moreover to represent it institutionally. --Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri On the occasion of last month's momentous demonstrations against the Bush administration's plans for a preemptive war on Iraq, I would like to pose an admittedly abstract inquiry concerning the uncertain effects of a particular form of abstraction that we have just witnessed in action: the invocation of "the world" as a universal location whose integrity is made to appear increasingly endangered—not directly by the menace of Islamisist terror, but by the very agent that for the past decade has with relative success made its own particular interests stand in for the prosperity and security of humanity as a whole. In speculating on the possible meanings of this metonymic crisis (i.e. the aggravation of the gap between the specific geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration and the global will it claims to embody) one point of departure is to consider the figure of "the world" itself, which was ubiquitous in the recent mobilizations, particularly in the visual rhetoric of United for Peace, the primary coordinator of anti-war activity in the United States. Conducting an analysis of this seemingly straightforward figure can hopefully help to illuminate some of the openings and risks to which we are exposed in thinking and feeling cosmopolitically—that is, when "the security of the people" becomes a question rather than an essential foundation. Such an analysis might also be useful in approaching the hinge between hegemony and the aesthetic, the point where political community emerges as passionate, embodied identification rather than hollow exhortation. Needless to say, this hinge has been skillfully managed by the Bush administration since September 11th. It remains to be seen if progressive forces—including artists and critics—will sustain an equally adroit attention to the affective preconditions for the emergence of a cosmopolitical solidarity that might displace the horizon of infinite war and permanent emergency currently offered by the administration at home and abroad. What does it mean to represent "the world"? For Martin Hiedegger, this question was not reducible to a simple epistemology of subject and object, of the potential or actual correspondence of thought to external reality. Rather than assume the stable preexistence of these positions, Hiedegger sought after the conditions of their emergence in early modern philosophy, identifying an original violence in what he called "the fundamental event of the modern age…the conquest of the world as picture." What concerned Hiedegger was not just the picturing of things in the world, but the production of the world itself as a "structured image" set out in front of "man," who now assumed the transcendental position of "a being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is." This setting up of the world as picture provides the subject with an apparently secure ground "for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is a whole," setting into motion "an unlimited power for the calculating, planning and molding of all things." Although Hiedegger's analysis sought primarily to open a key figure in western philosophy to question—the omnipotence and security of the knowing subject—his terms uncannily resonate as a description of the imperial designs of the Bush administration and the absolutization of U.S. sovereignty they explicitly foreground and project. As has been widely noted, the September 11th attacks generated a remarkable opening in the ideological horizons of U.S. geopolitical planning. Since the attacks, the administration has claimed for its policies a specifically theological legitimacy, identifying its historical task as the determination and protection of a universal moral substance. Any and all political decisions will thus be derived from the foundational moral goal first announced on September 14th, 2001 (and then a year later in the National Security Strategy): "to rid the world of evil." Not just any empirical evil, but evil itself. The guarantee of global right is a transcendental legal task, which must appeal to a higher power than the contingent legalities of the world. The world itself is at stake, and its normal, normative orders (such as the Charter of the United Nations) cannot be counted on for Order itself. Someone must stand above and outside the law to enforce true legality and preserve the moral substance of the community. To paraphrase Carl Schmitt, what emerges is a state of exception in which the validity of the law is suspended by a State that is itself exceptional. This is the logic of sovereign superpower evident in the National Security Strategy document, where we read that despite the global imperative of moral cleansing, the United States "will not hesitate to act alone" in the War on Terror. This principle of unfettered unilateral action informs the new doctrine of preemptive attack, from which conventional forms of international obligation, accountability, and judgment (i.e. those concerning the legitimate grounds for the deployment of force) have been demoted, if not expunged altogether. The projection of force is now defined as "anticipatory" rather than "reactive," authorizing individual states to determine in advance, "before they are fully formed," who or what embodies mortal danger to their security, and to eliminate these threats by any means necessary (including the use of nuclear weapons). Like Hiedegger's world-picturing subject, the time and space of U.S. sovereignty is without limit: permanent military superiority into the future (in anticipation of any and all possible challenges, defined apriori as threats and therefore always already being eliminated) and total geographical extension (over any and all places from which such a threat might emerge). Structuring and partially transcending the specificity of the Iraq invasion, it is this paradigm of sovereign power, ostentatiously foregrounded by the administration, that now provokes the "the world" to emerge as what Ernesto Laclau would call an "empty signifier" in the battle for cosmopolitical hegemony. As we shall see, this precarious emptiness is not an unfortunate accident that we could simply rectify by filling it in with the proper contents. It is precisely because "the world" as such has no proper contents that hegemonic struggle becomes possible and necessary at all. I would like to focus on what was undoubtedly the most prominent protest graphic displayed at last weekend's demonstrations in New York City: an image of the planet as seen from outer space, accompanied by the declaration (which also appeared at the main stage of the rally) "The World Says No to War!" In light of our earlier discussion, a disturbing question immediately presents itself: does not this figure epitomize the imperial subject-position interrogated by Hiedegger? For it seems to appeal to a disembodied point of view securely outside and above the world, a stable place from which everything in its entirety can be laid out as a predictable unity for an omnipotent gaze. Should we assume the irrevocable complicity of this figure with the taking-possession and obliteration of otherness typical of Western metaphysics? While we must be attentive to this dangerous possibility, it would be equally dangerous to foreclose in advance that this figure might have a life beyond its original iterations, that it might be capable of generating unforeseen claims and effects beyond its prior contexts and intended meanings. In other words, in approaching this world-picture at our current conjuncture, we must resist the temptation of replicating the world-picturing impulse itself: the claiming for the subject the power to anticipate and adjudicate any and every event, thus destroying eventfulness in favor of self-centered calculation. This is not a pedantic point: following Rosalyn Deutsche, I submit that the unsecuring of the grounds on which the "I" erects itself as sovereign is the unconditional ethical demand of any future cosmopolitics worthy of the name. Needless to say, this unsecuring has special implications—and responsibilities—for citizens of the United States at our current geopolitical conjuncture. The image of the earth as seen from outer space was first popularized as a rallying symbol in the liberal environmentalist discourse of the 1970's, where it was intended to evoke the transborder and immediately global character of ecological crises such as ozone depletion. In their overflowing of artificial geopolitical boundaries, such crises were taken to necessitate the recognition of planetary "interconnectedness" and the establishment of a popular allegiance to the preservation of bio-physical existence itself. With the earth envisioned as what the UN's Our Common Future report called a "fragile ball" whose bare survival hung in the balance, such discourses appealed to a generically "human" community before and beyond any specific social positioning in the world. Because it was undertaken in the name of the universal biological community, the task of evaluating and securing global life could thus appear as a matter of impartial expertise, unfettered by the narrowly political interests typical of local and national scales of coexistence. While this is not the place to delve in to the unhappy legacy of "sustainable development" that erected itself on these biophysical foundations, the relevant point is this: the setting up of the world as picture for a "we" assumed to share an underlying substance (in this case biological existence) and common ground (the impartial distance afforded from outer space) results in the obliteration of politics, or at least the demotion of the latter to a subsidiary feature of social existence. The pretension "to see everything from nowhere" defines politics as the stuff of profane embodiment, expunging it by definition from the sacred transcendence which is alone taken to guarantee an authentically global allegiance. With this prehistory of world-visualization in mind, what can the "World Says No To War!" poster tell us about the relationship between abstraction and embodiment being negotiated in last weekend's demonstrations? What were the grounds on which bodies erected themselves in the street, "taking a stand" against war? Where exactly were they standing? And what (or who) were they standing (in) for? The impossibility of answering these topological questions in absolute fashion is highlighted by the tropological structure of the poster; that is, the figure of speech it sets into motion. Not coincidentally, this figure of speech figures a figure speaking: the world. But properly speaking, can the world be said to speak? Does the round blue object pictured on the poster have a voice as its property, which it is then capable of expressing? If the world can speak, why doesn't it just say what it means? Why the imperative to declare that it speaks rather than just let it speak for itself? Intuitively, we know that the world understood as physical planetary entity does not share with humans the capacity to speak. It is a dumb thing. Recognizing this, it could be argued that it is of course not brute physical matter that speaks, but the human communities that inhabit it and whose aggregated desires and interests constitute "the world." Yet if we know that what is really speaking is living, breathing world-humanity, why resort to an inhuman and inanimate object such as the planet to make this known? By having a voice attributed to it, the planet is anthropomorphized, made through an act of metaphorical displacement into a speaking being. But who or what is the agent of this attribution? Where is its animating source? Behind and before this representative figure, is their a unified authorial will making its presence felt—the world, perhaps? Or might it be the case that rather than express or report on a preexisting condition, the image-statement makes something happen, retroactively positing the very foundations on which its claims to global authority rest? This is not to endow the declaration with supernatural powers, as if it actually generated the material existence of the world's body (or the multitude of bodies dwelling therein). But it is to suggest that precisely because the material body of the world has always already gone missing, only ever appearing through "abstract" substitutions—such as the image of the planet, or even the name "world" itself—that it is opened as a terrain in the battle for hegemony. This would mean that the detour taken by the poster through a literary or "aesthetic" moment—its reliance on an improper figure of speech in which the oppositions between human and the inhuman, subject and object, self and other are put into question—is not just a rhetorical flair, but essential to the emergent movement as a whole. Now, putting into question these oppositions should be distinguished from harmoniously resolving them—which is the role given to the "poetic imagination" by prominent liberal theorists of cosmopolitanism such as Martha Naussbaum. For her, "compelling art" always exhibits "recognition of the common in the strange and the strange in the common" that forms the basis for thinking, feeling, and acting in a global sphere beyond that of local and national self-interest. Art thus figures prominently in Naussbaum's post-September 11th injunction that Americans "find devices through which to extend our strong emotions and our ability to imagine the situation of others to the world of human life as a whole." Should the poster—or the demonstrations themselves, for that matter—be considered along the lines of Naussbaum's imagination-extending "devices"? If so, the image and the actions it helped to compel could be considered as global self-portraits, visual reflections of something about ourselves that would have otherwise remain hidden or repressed by the blinders of partisanship: our basic humanity, the ultimate criteria for organizing social life. In a recent Nation editorial entitled "The Will of the World," Jonathan Schell invokes precisely this metaphor of self-portraiture in his rousing description of the February 15th demonstrations: "We—that is, we the peoples of the earth—have examined the case for war in Iraq and rejected it. We have stepped forward onto the streets of our cities and looked at ourselves, and liked what we saw. We know our will. Now we must act. We can stop the war." Schell's invocation of this auto-spectacular, auto-erotic imagery (to which we will return below) suggests his attribution to the demonstrations of a general politico-philosophical meaning that structures but partially transcends the specific rejection of unilateral war plans of the United States government. Indeed, he identifies nothing less than a breakthrough in the history and horizons of democratization itself, evidenced by what he interprets as the global-popular desire for the reempowerment of the United Nations in the face of its strong-arming or even abandonment by the Bush administration. In Schell's words, "Not only has the human species made its will known; it also possesses an institution for effectuating that will: the United Nations." While Schell concedes that the UN is not an elected body, and remains for now an imperfect representational vehicle, he nonetheless maintains that the street-demonstrations were addressed not to national administrations of the world, but to their representatives in the global forum of the UN, who now have "the wind of public opinion at their backs." What he calls "the instant global agora" of the street demonstrations is nothing other than an ideal form of what the UN could and should be, a General Assembly writ large, whose "reason for existing" is "peace." It is not cynical to observe that Schell's editorial endeavor is an act of hegemonization, or "filling in" of the empty signifier "world" with the particular contents of actually existing international law, whose integrity is without a doubt endangered by the Bush Administration. Such a filling-in is obviously not a bad thing; it speaks to the urgent need of positing the bare principle of horizontal cross-border cooperation itself over and against the self-exceptionalization of U.S. sovereignty and the extra-legalization of war-making this entails. Operating at this level of impossible generality is probably necessary at this point in the current crisis; not unlike the mass mobilizations in the 1980's against nuclear proliferation (in which the image of the earth as seen from space also figured prominently—as did Jonathan Schell), the risk of massive and borderless physical destruction is understood to loom on the horizon, a risk from which the United States can longer consider itself immune. In such circumstances, it may well be that only an appeal to the quasi-biological survival of "the human species" (and its alleged embodiment in the familiar mechanisms of the UN) will be capable of capturing the affective allegiance of a majority large enough to create a genuine state of hegemonic crisis for U.S. geopolitical planners. The undisguised particularism with which the Bush administration has opened the horizon of world war risks making itself into the global enemy, as the maker of "war on the world." But in negatively identifying with a world that rejects war on itself, should we assume in advance the positive contents of that self? Is "the world" a proper name, inherently belonging to an actually existing subject with predetermined (or determinable) interests? Despite his laudable role as a public intellectual in the battle for anti-war hegemony, Schell answers in the affirmative, hypostasizing "the will of the world" in the figure of an ideal UN, attributing to both an existentially foundational desire for "peace." On one level, "peace" is a difficult principle to argue with, particularly when threatened with the enshrinement of unilateral preemptive war as the privileged solution to any and all conflict. But the advocacy of "peaceful solutions" as an empirical alternative to particular campaigns of unwarranted military aggression should not be allowed to slip into a covert valorization of "peace" as the transcendental essence of social life, even if it is posited as a utopian horizon rather than an actual achievement. To interrogate "peace" as a generic principle is not to resort to the doctrine of political Realism, which, following Hobbes, posits a brutal "war of all against all" as the natural and defining attribute of humanity. In fact, it is precisely such a doctrine that underlies the geopolitical planning of the Bush administration, for whom the world appears as little more than a collection of egoistic atoms whose ruthless drive for self-preservation risks precipitating absolute chaos, necessitating the erection of a new imperial Leviathan, whose exceptional, lawless sovereignty we have already discussed. Against the twin images of world-as-war and world-as-peace, what if the very principle of possessing the world as a perfect image were put into question? Not because its vast complexity or infinite texture simply exceeds our limited cognitive powers—this is no time for a vulgarized Sublime—but because the absolute, uncontaminated grounds from which such an image might be glimpsed—the view from outer space—is itself a chimera. The disembodied "I" is always weighed down by traces of the terrain over which it claims to soar. Without an impartial ground to which we might climb to get a clearheaded, birds-eye view of everything in its entirety, political action is unsecured. Not because we are cast into a sea of relativistic particularism, where each of us would possess our own autonomy to do (or see) our own thing. On the contrary; being immersed in the world with others (and in language) means that "our autonomy" and "our things" are never simply "our own." And this is not a peaceful condition. In fact, it is downright violent, provided we understand violence as referring not only to concrete acts of brutality, but to a more general condition in which things (and people) are interrupted from being fully themselves, putting their proper self-possession into crisis. This violent crisis is not spared on the events of February 15th, where according to Schell, the world grasped itself as a flattering self-portrait: "We have stepped forward into the streets of our cities…and looked at ourselves, and liked what we saw." In reading these lines about the pleasing auto-spectacularization of the world, of the world making peace with itself in the process of self-externalization in the street and on the screen, I am reminded of the my "own" experience on February 15th as I stood a mile back from the main stage, watching a real-time video feed of the event on a colossal monitor erected by the organizers. Intermittently, as the various speakers gave their speeches, the cameras delivering their messages from the stage would be turned back on the crowd, delivering it to itself in a remarkable drama of self –recognition, a kind of macro- mirror stage which effected in the crowd precisely the "jubilance" described by Lacan. This was perhaps most intense at the moment when an organizer took the stage to read an AP report: an unidentified diplomat inside the UN was quoted as saying that American and British negotiators, in acknowledgement of the overwhelming mobilizations taking place at that very moment, had decided to "reword" their proposed resolution, minimizing for the time being the word "force." I have since been unable to find a copy of this report--no mention was made of it in either the mainstream or left-wing coverage of the protests (understandably, for micro-jargonistic reengineering cannot be mistaken as indicating a fundamental doctrinal shift.) Nevertheless, this remains for me a kind of fleeting, hallucinatory figure of what Schell calls the "effectuation" of the global-popular will, an actual index of "the instant global agora." But the circular actuality of this instant—the real-time apprehension by the public of the traces of its own activity—was literally short-circuited: moments after the announcement was read and the crowd was shown to itself cheering in delight, the delivery system suffered a technical difficulty, interrupting the transmission of the image and leaving the enormous specular surfaces filled with nothing but empty static. How are we to read this static? And what of its emptiness? Was this interruption a mere accident, temporarily dispossessing the world-public of what rightly belonged to it—the fullness of its own image? Or might this bizarre coincidence reveal something more general about the relationship between possession and publicity (on whatever scale)? Perhaps unwittingly, the unsecuring of this relationship is registered in Schell's editorial, where he directs us to one of the ubiquitous hand-made signs on display at the New York demonstrations: "MY PLANET, RIGHT OR WRONG." Schell does not offer any interpretive commentary, presumably because he takes it as an exemplification of the spontaneous, global-popular common sense he has already identified. From this perspective, the sign would be read as an affirmative appeal to a higher law of planetary responsibility, beyond the parochial moral geography of patriotism. Refusing attempts to pathologize anti-war sentiment as complicit with a virulent (and potentially terroristic) anti-Americanism, the statement insists on the unconditional allegiance of local bodies to a global arena, with the latter being the ultimate ground and source of decision-making. Yet while the sign in one way affirms a relationship of belonging—the subject's belonging to the world before and beyond anything else—it might also be read against the grain, that is, as a calling into question of the belonging of the world to the subject. In other words, we can approach this undecideable statement as a meditation on the (in)justice of claiming for oneself the world as a possession. It would thus ask after the ethical rightness or wrongness of approaching everything on one's own terms, as if the world were "rightfully ones own." Reread as a question, the sign makes an unsettling address not only to the openly imperial designs of the Bush Administration but to demonstrators as well, particularly those in the global North. The sign might thus be read as an approximation of Emmanuel Levinas' assertion that "the presence of the other is equivalent to this calling into question of my joyous possession of the world," an event that interrupts the "synoptic and totalizing…virtues of vision" and the secure position such vision (precariously) lends to the "I" or the "We." In reading the static of the monitor and the undecideable claim of Schell's protest sign, what do we accomplish? What do these micro-allegories of the world-picture and its unsecuring mean for us politically? Do they not distract us from the urgency of the task at hand? Or is it precisely because we can taken for granted neither the task, the hand, nor the subject of which the hand might be the extension that we must question, rather than affirm the new figure of the world-people offered us by intellectuals such a Schell? Not in order to cynically negate the importance of the remarkable and salutary eventfulness of February 15th (nor the usefulness of Schell's editorial). Why then? In order to keep open the gap between the empty universality of the world-people and the particular bodies that attempt to stand in for it. Which means not that utopian emptiness should be celebrated in and of itself, but that no particular agent can claim for itself absolute coincidence with an underlying ontological substance—especially pacifist appeals to an essential humanity beyond violence and power. This is not to repudiate the necessity of robust political identifications; in fact, an emphasis on this insurmountable gap is what keeps alive the possibility of rendering more subtle—and radicalized—the cosmopolitical horizons that have been opened by the recent mobilizations. As we have seen, progressive liberals such as Schell project the rational consensus of an ideal UN as the end all and be all of what the global people might look like. And at one level, a relegitimized UN would be a great improvement on the current campaign to utterly unconstrain the exercise of US sovereignty. But at another level, current appeals to the generic legitimacy of the UN risk confirming and extending the notion that what is primarily amiss in the current crisis is the violation by the US of the preconstituted normative standards of "the international community" of capitalist states. Even as "the world" must demand the renormalization of the United States vis-à-vis its actually existing obligations, the normality of these norms should not be uncritically taken for granted. It reiterating them in the interest of restraining the Bush administration, they must also be opened to alteration, so as not to uphold a preexisting status quo as the end all and be all of our cosmopolitical aspirations. To insist on this alteration-in-reiteration is to suggest the inexahausted (and perhaps inexhaustible) potentiality of "the world." It is to operate within the quasi-utopian horizons declared by the counter-globalization movement (and now, certain strands of the anti-war movement): it is to affirm that "Another World Is Possible." Without moralistically abandoning the necessity of pragmatic calculation within the constraints of the given geopolitical conjuncture (such as what, if anything the left will advocate as a viable reconstruction plan for Iraq in the aftermath of what appears to be an inevitable war), it will be crucial to insist on the alterity of "another world"; neither a preconceived plan to be mechanically applied nor a voluntarist longing for a humanity peacefully reconciled with itself (epitomized by Pete Seeger's rendition of "Somewhere over the Rainbow" at the February 15th demonstrations in New York), this declaration might be read through the lens of Slavoj Zizek's remark that "Today…it is more important than ever to hold this utopian place of the global alternative open, even if it remains empty, living on borrowed time, awaiting the content to fill it in." As we have seen, one major contender for this hegemonic filling is a liberal-multilateralist appeal to a relegitimized UN. But while we must inhabit this discursive terrain, the possibility of reconfiguring and exceeding it should not be foreclosed. For along with putting at risk basic principles of multilateral cooperation and security in the global arena, the imperial designs of the Bush Administration also involve the imposition of a permanent state of exception in the domestic arena. Under the new Department of Homeland Security, the extra-legalization of law enforcement becomes a normalized affair, particularly for non-citizen residents whose already precarious civil rights are now in a state of virtual and in many cases actual suspension (which amounts to the same thing.) Recognizing this common structure of sovereign exception at home and abroad is the basis for the Not In Our Name (NION) project, a counter-publicity campaign initiated by artists, academics, activists and celebrities in the United States since September 11th Formulated in response to Bush's Manichean mapping of social space—"you're either with us or against us"—NION conceives its task as effecting a disidentification on the part of American citizens from the horizons of the War on Terror, in which unilateral foreign policy and politically unaccountable police-state measures are chained together as the guarantors of the "security of the people." Along with the "statement of conscience" published in major newspapers over the past two years, NION has energetically advocated its "Million Globes Campaign" to "display the earth" in place of the American flag, which, as they observe, became the exclusive site of collective identification in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The proliferation of the flag played a crucial role in setting the affective and psychic preconditions for legitimizing any and all policies of the Bush administration as the normal course of national grief and national security. As the "Million Globes" statement remarks, the flag became the symbolic equivalent of the "blank check" given to the executive branch by Congress to prosecute a "war without end," spatially, temporally, and purposefully. This latter phrase implies not that geopolitical planners have no purpose, but that beyond any identifiably finite goals, the War on Terror is designed to be unwinnable, for it assumes as normal the conditions that generate terrorism (and also, therefore the limitless measures of offensive security invoked to manage it). For NION, the signifier of the globe is posited as both the target of and resistance to the doctrine of "war without end." Erecting this specific frontier enables the globe to become a general equivalent for a range of particular elements that would otherwise be effaced by a generic condemnation of "war" and appeal to "peace." Contextualized with the statement "War Without End? Not in Our Name" the signifier of the globe functions to articulate a) resistance to the specific plans for war against Iraq b) repudiation of the broad doctrinal principles of US empire c) "refuge and solidarity" for non-citizens excluded from (and endangered by) appeals to patriotic nationalism d)the defense of the civil liberties of citizens and non-citizens against a hyperempowered Justice Department. While each element of this program is amenable to strategy-based calculation, when linked together via the articulatory mechanism of the globe, they endeavor to effect a shift in the horizons of democratic representation which is irreducible to the satisfaction of any one of the particular demands in the chain. For it unsecures the identity of "the people" on which the Bush administration claims to ground its authority. It insists on the gap between the name "people" uttered by the president and the narrow interests he actually seeks to extend. In foregrounding this gap, we might assume the assertion to be that "our" name has been wrongfully hijacked, expropriated for a deviant purpose, applied to something that does not correspond to what we in fact are. The task then, would be to reclaim for ourselves what rightfully belongs to us: our proper name. With name and subject finally reunited, the grounds for community would be secure. Without gap, distortion, or mediation, "the people" would transparently be what it is—and act accordingly. But--to echo an analysis offered above--what if there is always something improper about our names, our things, and ourselves? What if, as Claude Lefort has suggested about "public space," the names "people" and "world" belonged, by right, to no one? This would mean that reclaiming them from them from Bush would be an open-ended discursive construction, not a proper restoration. It would mean not taking for granted to who or what these names correspond, thus introducing a healthy uncertainty into our impossible, yet necessary claims to cosmopolitical community. _________________________________________________________________ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net