Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

282 Brian Holmes
FIGURE 10.2. The BBC interviewed a member of the Yes Men who was impersonating an
executive of the Dow Chemical Corporation on the twentieth anniversary of the Bhopal tragedy in
India, December 3, 2004. Dow had assumed Union Carbide’s assets but rejected responsibility for the
disaster and has made minimal efforts to compensate the thousands of victims. The ersatz executive
informed a stunned BBC reporter that Dow was now ready to compensate victims even if this meant
liquidating the entire company. Later Dow publicly rejected any such offer. Courtesy of the Yes Men,
http://www.theyesmen.org.
“resymbolizing machines.” One of their goals is to create a “map generator,”
which would be “a machine allowing everyone to generate the maps they
need for their actions, by entering data concerning the business or administration
in which they work, or about which they have found some information.”
24 There is a double aim here: to identify the spatial organization and
ownership hierarchy of the long, fragmented production lines of the global
economy, and at the same time, to suggest the possibility of alternative formations
that could articulate different publics. As they explain: “A production
line is heterogeneous and multilinguistic from the very outset. It has no
border, even though it has relative limits. It constitutes a republic of individuals,
in other words, a non-territorial republic, which emerges in the face
of the increasingly real perspective—conWrmed by the gradual application
of the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)—of a privatization
of those functions which still remain the monopoly of the State
(justice, education, territory, police, army).”