Brian Holmes - Quotes

Play your parts, backwards or forwards, right-side up or up-side down, or leave them behind if you choose. And just imagine what might happen, if the Errorist International washed up by mistake on a beach in Australia.
Holmes, Brian.

Should information about the U.S. Government's Dealings with the rest of the world be free? A lot of European hackers and NGOs seem to think so - and let's not forget all the people on the Other sides of the globe Who agree.
Holmes, Brian.

As the world slides to Deepening Economic Crisis Into, It Seems That giant Corporations and sovereign state apparatus no Longer hold all the cards. As They Say in France: At least we'll know What sauce're Going To Be eaten with.
Holmes, Brian.

How then does a democratic systems aesthetic come into play, in the face of security panic with its inherent tendencies toward invisibility, concealed intentions, censorship and even aggression? What we have is the paradoxical, yet also paradigmatic case where one systemic boundary can only be identified by determining another.
Holmes, Brian.

What this means is that an aesthetic system must be constituted as a fully operational reality: a project, a team, an alliance or network that can probe the contours of the secret, dissimulating system, and at the same time, reveal those hidden outlines mimetically, through its own outer forms, its own vocabularies and images, its characteristic modes of appearance and communication. What you get then, in art, are elaborate fakes, doppelgängers, double agents, fictional entities that strive to produce outbreaks of truth at their points of contact with the hidden system. What you get, in other words, are counter-models, the virtual outlines of rival systems. This is the principle of some of the most advanced art of our day.
Holmes, Brian.

And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.
Holmes, Brian.

Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions.
Holmes, Brian. "Cartography of Excess." in: Distributed Creativity.Typepad. No Date.

...how could you successfully represent an alternative, radically democratic experience?
Holmes, Brian. "Cartography of Excess." in: Distributed Creativity.Typepad. No Date.

The great theoretical swing of the past three decades, from critical negation to use value and subversive affirmation, has left "progressive" practices wide open to every complicity. Despite the autopoetic processes that an installation like USE so brilliantly lets us see, the entire planet - Spaceship Earth - is prey to a resurgence of repressive authority, within the perfectly legible game of the capitalist world-economy. Berlusconi's Italy, where the project has been shown, is hardly an exception: and yet it is also one of the laboratories for new forms of political mobilization. Can we imagine artistic representations of self-organizing processes, in open confrontation with the economic game? "Rules oppose and derail subjectivity,loosen the imprinted circuits of the individual," wrote Oyvind Fahlström. Only then does a deeper territory emerge, a more complex interplay: power lines/radical democracy.
Holmes, Brian. "Cartography of Excess." in: Distributed Creativity.Typepad. No Date.

What happened at the turn of the millennium, when a myriad of recording devices were hooked up to the internet, and the World Wide Web became an electronic prism refracting all the colors of a single anti-capitalist struggle? What kind of movement takes to the barricades with samba bands and videocams, tracing an embodied map through a maze of virtual hyperlinks and actual city streets?
Holmes, Brian. "Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

The mobilizing process for global resistance actions immediately became known as 'self-organization' because of the absence of hierarchical chains of command. At the same time, the starburst patterns of network graphs became emblems of a cooperative potential that seemed to define the 'movement of movements'.
Holmes, Brian. "Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

What lends form and regularity to emergent action? How to grasp the consistency of self-organized groups and networks? The word "swarming" describes a pattern of self-organization in real time, which seems to arise from nowhere yet is immediately recognizable, because it rhythmically repeats. It was understood by strategists as a pattern of attack ...
Holmes, Brian. "Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

It was understood by strategists as a pattern of attack, in the classic definition given by RAND corporation theorists Arquilla and Ronfeldt: "Swarming occurs when the dispersed units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall aim is sustainable pulsing – swarm networks must be able to coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new pulse."3 Arquilla and Ronfeldt studied these pulsating tactics in the complex patterns of mediated and on-the-ground support for the Zapatistas, which prevented the Mexican state from isolating and destroying them. Interestingly, the "target" here was the repressive activity of the state.
Holmes, Brian. "Swarmachine: Activist Media Tomorrow." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

Creating the truth of our post-democratic societies is a deceptively simple affair.
Holmes, Brian. "Let it Rip! Obituary of an Endless Myth: Public Netbase 1994-2006." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

Not everyday do you get the chance to squat a brand-new global infrastructure, designed and perfected by the military-infotainment complex of the planet's sole remaining superpower. Still it's strange how few were there to seize the occasion.
Holmes, Brian. "Let it Rip! Obituary of an Endless Myth: Public Netbase 1994-2006." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

By filling a website with a free text-library, and a physical location with radical artists and thinkers attracted by the lack of bureaucratic control, Public Netbase became a north star or magnetic pole in the still-uncharted realms of networked culture.
Holmes, Brian. "Let it Rip! Obituary of an Endless Myth: Public Netbase 1994-2006." in: Future Non Stop. No Date. (English).

Where does security end, and insecurity begin? Systems analysts recognise this as a classic boundary question. Its answer determines the precise deployment of any security system. But as we shall see, this particular boundary question cannot be answered under present conditions, except through the definition of a second system, a specifically interrogatory one.
Holmes, Brian. "Security Aesthetic=Systems Panic." in: Rhizome. August 26, 2009.

The security system expands dynamically, continually adjusting its relations to the outside world, continually redefining its own boundaries as a system.
Holmes, Brian. "Security Aesthetic=Systems Panic." in: Rhizome. August 26, 2009.

One can easily imagine how a home, an airport or a harbour can be made ‘secure’. An initial, safe or ‘quiet’ inside space must simply be preserved from outer harm. But what happens in a complex social system, one composed of many different actors, some with irreconcilably diverging interests? What happens when the space to be protected is as much linguistic and ideological as it is physical and architectural, so that a breach of legitimacy or a leak of information can be perceived as illicit ingress or egress? In short, what happens in a contested environment where threats can arise from within? The response is clear: what happens is vertiginous paranoia.
Holmes, Brian. "Security Aesthetic=Systems Panic." in: Rhizome. August 26, 2009.

The problem of the system’s edges suddenly multiplies: the boundary to be secured is now the entire volume of the system, its width, its breadth, its depth, its characteristics and qualities and most damnedly of of all, its human potential for change. The resulting proliferation of eyes, ears, cameras, snooping devices, data banks, cross-checks and spiraling analytical anxiety in the face of every conceivable contingency is what defines the present security panic. Under these conditions, no form of precaution could appear superfluous. Statistical models of equilibrium are checked constantly against real-time deviations. Nascent trends are examined for potentially hostile extrapolations. Endlessly ramifying if-then scenarios are extended preemptively into the future. An aesthetics of closure striving toward mathematical certainty becomes the tacitly nourished ethos of the security system.
Holmes, Brian. "Security Aesthetic=Systems Panic." in: Rhizome. August 26, 2009.

As you can see from the world around us, any security system is destined under stress to become an entity of uncertain contours, a veritable black hole in society, extending its cloak of invisibility to the exact extent that its internal paranoia deepens; and at the same time generating an external paranoia about its operations that can only provoke a redoubling of its initial drive to stealth and invisibility. Under these conditions, what becomes necessary for the maintenance of democracy is a specific kind of social system, whose probing and questioning can provide some renewed transparency. This is where art criticism used to have great ideas.
Holmes, Brian. "Security Aesthetic=Systems Panic." in: Rhizome. August 26, 2009.

The bodies on the line were Etcétera, who think of themselves less as a group of artists and more as a movement of the surrealistic imagination. During the heyday of the anti-militarist escraches, from 1998 to 2001, they would stage delirious theatrical events in front of the houses of former murderers and torturers, as part of a larger project of denunciation carried out by the sons and daughters of those who disappeared in Argentina’s “dirty war” (H.I.J.O.S.: Children for Identity and Justice, against Oblivion and Silence).Politics has always been at the heart of their concerns, but protest tactics of the usual sort would never be enough for Etcétera, whose story is filled with unlikely inventions, improbable encounters. While seeking to squat an empty building for their activities, the collective happened upon the abandoned premises of the former Argonauta publishing house founded by the surrealist Juan Andralis, filled with dusty books, photographs, images, paintings, sculptures, costumes and old mannequins from the 1930s-40s. It was a turning point, a moment of "objective chance," just as Marcel Duchamp had described it.
Holmes, Brian. "The Errorist International: Washed Up on a Beach in Australia." in: transform.eipcp.net. January 1, 2007. (English).

Those days of the truth are gone, however, “cleaned up” by the return of the politicians and the police; and now we have all become “phony people,” wandering around the world circus, connected by wires and whispers, watching, wondering, waiting for the next lucky chance. Maybe Etcétera realized this around the time when they photocopied me into the Gente Armada, shrunken down to the size of a dwarf, with a copy of the journal Multitudes in my hands and an even more diminutive Karl Marx as a sidekick. But the return of the police and the politicians has not stopped people from protesting, nor Etcétera from stumbling into more improbable encounters.
Holmes, Brian. "The Errorist International: Washed Up on a Beach in Australia." in: transform.eipcp.net. January 1, 2007. (English).

Such was the case on another day of celebration, November 5, 2005, when the President of the World Mr. G.W. Bush came flying to the city of Mar del Plata in Argentina for the failed Fourth Summit of the Free Trade Area of the Americas – one of the biggest mistakes of an administration that has made them its specialty. U.S. Marines were directing traffic and people in a supposedly sovereign country, while on the other side of the fence, Chavez and Maradona worked up their worshipers to an anti-imperial frenzy, tossing around the name of G.W. Bush like a political football.
Holmes, Brian. "The Errorist International: Washed Up on a Beach in Australia." in: transform.eipcp.net. January 1, 2007. (English).

...it seems that Derrida's very interiorized reflections on inheritance and choice are more important to you than to me, or maybe it's just a matter of priorities. For me, politics and therefore commitment starts outside, with social movements, it starts in the street, as a collective creation. What is created is, in fact, the outside itself, an embodied critical gap with the prevailing norms.
Holmes, Brian and Rene Gabri (Interviewer). "Journalisms, Interview with Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality." in: Beaver Group 16. August 2, 2004.

You find yourself thrust into a collective attempt to rework the tools of previous struggles, previous generations. And then you begin moving through this collective effort, according to your understandings and predilections, but also according to what works, to what builds solidarity, opens up new possibilities, permits concrete victories and gains. For me, that meant relinking with a Marxist economic analysis of globalization first of all; then trying to integrate anarchist, autonomist and differentialist variations, which lead away from reliance on state bureaucracies and correspond more closely to the way people experience themselves and their social relations.
Holmes, Brian and Rene Gabri (Interviewer). "Journalisms, Interview with Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality." in: Beaver Group 16. August 2, 2004.

...in The Flexible Personality, I tried to look at the way that the collective creations of the 60s and 70s had been analyzed, and how that analytic process - carried on by governments, human resources departments, advertisers, educators - had gradually resulted in the creation of new normative models which responded to certain aspects of former critiques, and flattered people's aspirations to a certain kind of freedom or disalienation. In other words, how did a more-or-less calculated response to the 60s' anti-disciplinary, anti-authoritarian revolts finally produce the control societies of the 1990s?
Holmes, Brian and Rene Gabri (Interviewer). "Journalisms, Interview with Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality." in: Beaver Group 16. August 2, 2004.

So what has autonomist thinking, broadly considered, produced in the past 3 or 4 years? The notion of a casualized rebellion, a political cooperation among the flexible workers, linking undocumented immigrants, part-time or short-contract chain store employees, the unemployed, the urban fringe dwellers, and the so-called "cognitariat" or free-lance intellectual workers. Check out the website chainworkers.org to get an idea, look at the Mayday parades, the new forms of strikes, the new expressive politics which has thoroughly analyzed both the logic of flexible exploitation and the techniques of cultural cooptation. You might also read the stuff on the latest Republicart series. Here you have the material embodiment of a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of difference, of productive difference I mean. The difference that goes on differing, producing a heterogeneous world and not just a proliferating set of signs.
Holmes, Brian and Rene Gabri (Interviewer). "Journalisms, Interview with Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality." in: Beaver Group 16. August 2, 2004.

First of all, I think there would be an awful lot to be learned from an attempt to seriously study and make public the geographical specifics of the new global division of labor. It's difficult, because one would have to take into account not only localities on the macro-scale (countries, regions), but also flows of populations and patterns of resettlement, and all of this without reifying or reducing anything, with a full understanding of the existing divisions of labor and hierarchies of class in societies and localities all around the planet. Formidable task! But not taking it on means not being able to even begin to understand how contemporary capitalism works, and who works for it, when, where, how, under what conditions.
Holmes, Brian and Rene Gabri (Interviewer). "Journalisms, Interview with Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality." in: Beaver Group 16. August 2, 2004.

If I look to the artists and cultural producers whom I respect and appreciate, it appears that Ollman has summed up everything most important to them. The decision as to what the artistic work will be, and how it will be carried out - and when, and where, and why - is not merely their individual choice, but it is never dictated from the outside. The desire for cooperation - and thus, for sharing the decision - has always been made into a substantial reality, either through the formation of groups, or through different kinds of temporary or long-term associations.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

The capacity to control, or at least, to remain responsible to the artistic products in their material circulation through society - and thus, the capacity to maintain the ethical basis of the project - is always a priority, resulting in elaborate mechanisms of presentation and distribution, principled conceptions (or rejections) of the rights to copy and authorship, and above all, a continuing concern for the extent and quality of use. None of these things should "appear as something else." The problem of alienation, in other words, has been taken seriously.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

Why is it so difficult to inscribe this possibility in contemporary institutions? Paolo Virno most persuasively develops this theme, in his discussions of the fundamentally linguistic form of work which he calls "virtuosity." He explains that three central functions which have traditionally been separate in the self-understanding of the Western societies, from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, are now impossible to distinguish. These functions are labor, conceived as the productive expenditure of bodily energy; intellectual activity, which is silent and solitary; and political action, whose vector is public speech. But since the three have melded together with the advent of intellectual, affective and communicational forms of work - the so-called 'immaterial labor' of the 'general intellect'.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

The contemporary writer who has most effectively raised these questions is the Brazilian schizoanalyst Suely Rolnik. Her understanding of social relations begins from a phenomenology in which creative activity has a specific place. Our sensibility is divided, she explains, into perception and sensation: on the one hand, an empirical grasp of the world as form, leading to the establishment of fixed representations; on the other, an intensive encounter with the world as living force, which can be mobilized again in expressive activity. Empirical perception allows us to consolidate relatively stable maps of our situation in the world, but these constituted maps also act as an obstacle to the sensation of the constant irruption of otherness in our sensibility - and therefore to the creation of new modes of relation, which can only be effectively expressed through active resistance to the conservative forces shaped by the old schemas. From this outlook, we can conceive an agonist ic involvement in the world, but one which does not only result in sterile confrontation with an objectified enemy; for political resistance itself is understood within the transformational dynamic of reknitting and even reinventing the relation with the other.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

Yet this expressive politics, which became widespread in the sixties and seventies, has been submitted over the last two decades to extremely sophisticated devices which split the force of creation from that of resistance. These devices (the specific forms of production in the postmodern economy) cause the creative process to turn nervously around its own axis, motivated by a capitalistically profitable, but existentially frustrating quest for the unattainable safe-havens of "luxury subjectivity," whose glossy image is continually projected by the media.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

Thus an economy based on the incessant production of images and signs is able to conjure up and expropriate a "wellspring of free invention power" - in a context where the word freedom has become a synonym of separation. In this situation, where each continually refines his or her originality in the endless, competitive quest to attain a higher personal price, it is not difficult to see how the "constituent elements" of a distinctively human relation have, in Ollman's terms, been reorganized "to appear as something else": the exercise of the productive force reappearing as a hunger for technological power; the ease of cooperative sociability reappearing as an egotistical thirst for pleasure; the sense of responsibility to the material complexity of society reappearing as a restless claim to ubiquity in the world-space.
Holmes, Brian. "Emancipation." in: Nettime. July, 6 2004.

The first thing to do is to figure out what capitalism is. I think a theorist of anti-capitalism has a big job just putting names and locations and maybe even faces on all the money that controls the world.
Holmes, Brian and World-Information.org (Interviewer). "Practicing Anti-Capitalism: an Interview with Brian Holmes." in: World-Information.org. 2003.

The more of a sense you develop for how to follow the trails of capitalism, the more likely you are to find them, because such traces must exist, given the demands of the system. But the question is not only finding these traces, they must be put into an explanatory framework to make them more tangible for the people who are being controlled. Finance is a mechanism of control, and what we try to do in these maps is to show how different types of control are actually connected.
Holmes, Brian and World-Information.org (Interviewer). "Practicing Anti-Capitalism: an Interview with Brian Holmes." in: World-Information.org. 2003.

Power is concentrated also in the capacity to do research and strategic analysis. People have different kinds of skills, and these could be assembled in a network process where they gain nuance, and where they can do some kinds of things that were formerly limited to organized researchers with a hierarchical structure behind them. I think in that sense the open source notion is in no way limited to technology or to code writing and has become a much larger possibility. This is not only very interesting but somehow vital.
Holmes, Brian and World-Information.org (Interviewer). "Practicing Anti-Capitalism: an Interview with Brian Holmes." in: World-Information.org. 2003.

What does it mean for the average citizen to be a fascist? I do not have a certain answer to this question. Anyone with a more precise understanding should help here.
Holmes, Brian. "Fascism." in: Nettime. May 31, 2003.

If in the United States no serious and deep public questioning arises concerning the use of false intelligence and reporting to justify the declaration and pursuit of war, if such questioning is not accompanied by formal political and legal investigation, then I think we would have to face the disastrous reality that significant sectors of the world's wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation are willing to be lied to by their leaders.
Holmes, Brian. "Fascism." in: Nettime. May 31, 2003.

While nervously awaiting that moment of truth, I'd appreciate it if people currently inside the US could give their observations on the way this first test unfolds.
Holmes, Brian. "Fascism." in: Nettime. May 31, 2003.