Continental Drift

= blog, and ongoing research project by Brian Holmes, with a critique and analysis of neoliberal capitalism, culminating in a book.

URL =

Project

"The blog, Continental Drift at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com, is an essay-writing worksite, updated continuously with Brian Holmes entire output as a public intellectual, whether occasional talks, spur-of-the-moment rants or polished full-length texts dealing with the analysis and subversion of cognitive capitalism and liberal empire.

The blog was launched in early 2007 in parallel to the work of the autonomous seminar Continental Drift, developed since 2005 in collaboration with Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver Group (www.16beavergroup.org/drift). The seminar, gathering artists, theorists and activists, was conceived as a response to the deterioration of democratic discourse and public space under the influence of the outgoing American imperial administration. The essays on the blog are therefore Holmes personal work, but can also be considered as individual contributions to a collective practice.

Materials from the blog have recently been gathered into a book, _Escape the Overcode: Creative Art in the Control Society_, which will be published in early 2009 by WHW and the Van Abbemuseum. The book is freely accessible: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/book-materials."

(https://archive.transmediale.de/continental-drift)

Article

• Article: Continental Drift: Activist Research, From Geopolitics to Geopoetics. Brian Holmes. Ephemera, Issue 4, December 2005.

URL = http://ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/5-Xholmes.pdf

"The counter-globalization movements marked the first attempt at a widespread, meshworked response to the chaos of the post-’89 world system. These movements were an uneasy mix between democratic sovereignists, no-border libertarians (David Graeber’s ‘new anarchists’) and traditional, union-oriented Keynesians. They could all critique the failures of neoliberal governance, but they all diverged and faltered before its cultural consequences. And the latter wasted no time coming. By undercutting social solidarities and destroying ecological equilibriums, the neoliberal program of accelerated capital expansion immediately spawned its neoconservative shadow, in the form of a military, moral and religious return to order. Nothing could have made better cover for the denial of democratic critique, the clampdown on civil liberties and the continuing budgetary shift from social welfare to corporate security. The backlash against globalization became a powerful new tool of manipulation for the elites who launched the whole process in the first place. The current scramble to consolidate regional blocs reflects the search for a compromise between global reach and territorial stability. Beyond or before the ‘clash of civilizations,’ a feasible scale of contemporary social relations is the leading question. From this perspective, the free-market policy of the Bush administration in Latin America is comparable to Al Qaeda’s dreams of an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East. The networked production system forming around Japan and China, or the EU’s continuous diplomatic courtship of Russia despite flagrant atrocities in Chechnya, give similar insights into this quest for a workable scale, which is essentially that of a ‘continent,’ however elastic or imprecise the term may be. Paradoxically, continentalization is not countered but is driven ahead by global unification. Behind the tectonic shifts at the turn of the millennium lies the accumulated violence of a thirtyyear neoliberal push toward a borderless world, wide open to the biggest and most predatory corporations. "

Summary

- Reading notes from Michel Bauwens, 2006:

This essay on continental 'regional integration' contains a critique of Empire:

- 1) the identification of the hegemony of immaterial labor, applies mostly to the tertiary sector in the West and obscures the global division of labor

- 2) the thesis of the worldwide expansion of US constitutionalism as a vector of globalization obscures the financial aspects of the new domination, i.e. the global division of power

What we are witnessing today, after 9/11, is what Polanyi calls the 'double movement'

   - neoliberalism is attacking the foundations on which rests a society
   - society is creating a counter-movement but which can be just as dangerous

This is what happened after 1914 with the emergence of fascism and protectionism, i.e. solutions that were worse than the problem. Today we have a similar rise of christian fundamentalism in the US and of xenophobia and racism in Europe, as well as Jihadism. Most dangerous is that these movements feed each other.

Regionalism is also a reaction against the free market, showing that the ideal of global regulation by the IMF and World Bank is irrealistic.