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in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
Stories
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
23, 2003
The Infernal Machine
"Architectures"
in Service to Nothing
By GAVIN KEENEY
The machine that ate the garden rages on (and
on and on). It bulldozes everything every day. We are all 'landing
sites', and this machine levels everything making sure nothing
significant might land there (in us).
Rem Koolhaas has declared architecture
dead ... I have never listened much to his pronouncements, given
that he dumped a load of vacuous rubble into the discourse of
architecture anyway. But he is right, insofar as reputation-mongering
leads to reputation-mongering leads to reputation-mongering.
Everything else is destroyed in the process -- every other alternative.
The world is destroyed every day by the vast machine rolling
relentlessly towards oblivion.
Arundhati Roy has suggested throwing
monkey wrenches. But the machine is now so vast, it would require
a cosmic monkey wrench ... which we may anyway, any day soon
get. Something has to land to stop the machine.
The machine is Capitalism writ large,
ugly, and in-between ... everywhere, every day ... It crushes
every other idea that comes along -- every question mark is shredded
along with the self-incriminating documents.
Capitalism survives by endless abstraction.
What is needed to counter it is a radical contingent alternative
vision ... an aesthetics of the sublime, and a sublime aesthetics
(Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou's 'Universal'). Zizek is right
to defend the principle of radical individuality ... What else
is more dangerous to the machine ??? Where else might we find
the landing site for Some-thing Else ???
This Some-thing Else (this sublime aesthetics)
has been called The Coming Philosophy (Walter Benjamin) ... or
The Coming Community (Giorgio Agamben) ... It is the vast landing
site within things (including the human soul) that awaits Some-thing
Else.
I know so many people, right now, trying
to clear away the rubble and free this landing site. The machine
senses their presence and grows more subtle and pernicious. The
demi-urgic thing -- the Capitalistic beast -- colonizes everything
everywhere ... dreams and nightmares. The Surrealist idea that
advertizing colonized the unconscious is just one such insight.
That this machine is now attempting to finish off the human soul
is an entirely different matter.
The way out is always the same way out
... What matters must be sorted out from what doesn't matter.
What matters is the nothing much that the machine can never touch.
For everyone, today, this nothing much is everything that matters.
It must be sited -- again -- in the world as a force that can
stop the machine. It requires that everyone still aware of this
nothing much marshals the strength (the inner and outer resources)
that the machine hijacks to clear away that site, to locate it,
and to re-write it into the world.
McHouses, McCars, McCorporations, and
McPeople ... What else ??? What can replace such a titanic withering
force ??? The secret, sublime antidote (the way out) is to say
'No' to the machine, and to say 'Yes' to everything else.
Cities are the crisis point ... They
are the test tube for new experiments in subjecting people to
new forms of colonization. In most cities, the interface has
been lost (the landing site paved over repeatedly, buried in
rubble and resurfaced again and again). Currently, there is a
new vast empty thing called Landscape Urbanism making the rounds
of architecture schools and design studios equating urban landscape
with infrastructure. The former broken interface is to be replaced
by a new, fully synthetical interface where everything once 'given'
is turned into something 'taken away' (but sold back to you).
This so-called new idea is quite simply the reification of the
broken idea of Nature ... It is part and parcel of the logic
of the machine to take away things 'given' and sell them back
to you as the latest, newest thing.
Architecture everywhere is in service
to the machine. With few exceptions it services that machine.
Massimo Cacciari has asked for buildings that 'sing' -- when
what we almost always get instead is building that further divides
and destroys the experience of the world (dividing, sub-dividing,
and parceling out space, selling space back to us), while pretending
that progress has been made. Such architectures are bankrupt
even though they made the capitalist machine whirl. Public space
has been systematically colonized these past decades such that
it is unrecognizable as such. Public resources have been converted
to quasi-public piggy banks for speculators ... in the name of
productivity and efficiency. Architecture continues to mutate
-- attempting valiantly at times to get out of its own path --
re-generating itself and its role, struggling to free its potential,
only to fall again into the grinding maw of the machine that
is always-already eating the garden.
This bleak scenario contains a singular
silver lining ... This silver lining is a golden thread. This
golden thread leads out of the labyrinth (Manfredo Tafuri's labyrinth)
to a sphere outside, in the air, in the imagination, in the spirit
of every thing 'useless' (not yet subjugated, or dying to be
reborn out of subjugation). This vast sphere is Idealism Itself
... It involves the collapsing of subject-object dichotomies
(of Master-Slave dichotomies). It is mocked in the marketplace
of ideas every day ... It is mocked and it is crucified every
day. So what ??? This sphere is the landing site the machine
can never touch. Embrace it and bring on a new, better world.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect in New York and writes on the subject
of landscape + architecture + other things, a cultural amalgam
always-already forthcoming. He is author of On
the Nature of Things (Birkhauser, 2000).
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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