Brian Holmes

mi, 22.04.2003 04:37

I am Brian Holmes, I am an art critic, culture critic and activist, usually all at once. I live in France and have been participating in many demonstrations these last years, first with the group Ne pas plier and more recently with Bureau d'Etudes, who try to map out the actors of global capitalism and the resistance to it.

I am Brian Holmes, I am an art critic, culture critic and activist, usually all at once. I live in France and am bilingual (Spanish and Italian too). I have been participating in many demonstrations these last years, first with the group Ne pas plier and more recently with Bureau d'Etudes, who try to map out the actors of global capitalism and the resistance to it. I have also done some writing on the kind of subjectivity formed by the new regime of networked capitalism; most pertinent in this respect is my essay, "The Flexible Personality: For a new cultural critique," which you can find at .

Actually I ended that piece with a call for exactly the kind of intersection between activism and university scholarship that this list is proposing! So you can imagine I am very interested to see what we can do.


I suggest we take ourselves seriously. We are all intellectuals, we have the advantages of diversity and difference, of radicality and conviction. We shall have to develop tools to make those advantages into concrete effects. I think that one of the strongest effects would be to light the fires of serious critique in the University, to such an extent that those who begin to practice this critique feel compelled to move outside the University's protective realm. My notion is that this goal requires both the best scholarship and the committment of putting your body on the line. Between the two I think we can generate a new form of cultural capital (Bourdieu's term of course) that will become a common coin in the University and will shake its habitants out of their complacency, that will force them, for their own "interest," to look beyond the neutral, value-free, ass-kissing work that they too often do.


I think this mailing list can be a great place to trade ideas and to debate. I think we should also have a website to post papers to. One way we could help each other and our common cause is to get those papers published! The more speaking engagements, the more publications, and the more we will make the problematics that interest us into unavoidable landmarks in the fields of sociology, political science, cultural studies, philosophy, art and literary crit, etc. Such are my initial ideas.