Anyone read that interview with Negri? I think he said we ought to think of
the subaltern as the "salt of the earth," that agrees with G2K.

George Will on Sunday TV by the way, they don't think anyone did anything,
and to say so is "unpatriotic" said Cheney.

I think there are also useful questions about how Negri and Hardt's relates
to Genius 2000. Both are about utopian realism, utopian materialism let's
say, and neither one stole the idea from the other. Add Wolfram to that, I
can only wonder how he relates to Negri and Hardt.

On a separate note, we all of us as artists know now that the concept or
meaning of history has basically been flipped over like a pancake. My
contention is that human cognition, both real and imagined, is inside this
same flip.

Yes I rehash a lot of other people's ideas, but I think of it as trying them
on–I think that's what Yeats meant by "for every tatter in its mortal dress"
for example, Deleuze and Guattari called it "sex without progeny" when he
reads the old geniuses.

History, cognition, and the power relations between them, that's the main
idea behind Genius 2000. I prefer Jevbratt's data-mingling model at
http://www.artsconnected.org/millennialmuseum/displayitem.cfm?item) to what
I consider traditional poststructuralist theory of the US academy since 1980.
I'm not saying it's not worth reading, just in need of revision and update.
I'd venture to say Jevbratt herself is presenting her work on agents as a
major and significant advance.

If Jevbratt's ideas about literature are sound, the implications of her
design of autopoetic machines that is, then what we think of now as literary
theory is no longer as relevant or pertinent as one38.org or the ESMOML.

NN's software is also an important development. Let me be clear that I do
not use any advanced software nor do I know programming, so I look at NN as a
literature work. It's the previously unwritten second half of Dostoevsky's
first book. It really does work as literature, I'd argue the best writer
since Dostoevsky for the literate English-speaking reader.

One reason they call Benjamin a hack is that he went along with the
hallucinatory strategies of war. He was like Kurtz. So was Dostoevsky. He
wore them.

And look where all this machismo got us, virtually nowhere. Personally I
think that Empire and counter-Empire are most related to the idea of
isotropic–equal stress along all axes.

I'm not a pessimist by nature however. Like many USA intellectuals, I have
concerns about media control and free speech. I'd argue this moralia applies
to most intellectuals in the developed world. I also agree with legal forms
of popular protest to influence government policy and petition the state.

To give the conservatives their due, the next century appears already to have
been written as a horror story, a universal massacre. Any serious
improvements would yes have to appear utopian, appear as utopianism. This
does not mean they are not improvements.

Again I would refer back to Negri's talk about counter-empire. And if I'm
not mistaken, he himself explains his diagnosis much in a data-mingling
situation between Empire (inviter/host), counter-Empire (guest) and
post-Empire (my response as parasite); plus they all switch roles etc.

Max Herman
http://albalux.com/g2k/pv

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