[Brian Holmes is offering the seminar “Continental Drift” in September and October, 2005 in New York City in conjunction with the 16 Beaver art group. Autonomedia will publish a collection of Holmes’ essays, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms, this winter.]
This seminar is called “Continental Drift,” and it’s about the different sorts of regional blocs that are forming in the world and in our heads. Now, the first questions to ask could be these:
Why even talk about regional blocs or continental integration? Isn’t that just about the European Union, and its attempt to regain some lost power? Why not pursue the bottom-up theory of the multitude that was launched with the book Empire? Or conversely, why not admit that the real force of globalization is American imperialism? How can the abstractions of geopolitics have any meaning for the ordinary individual? And what does “continental drift” have to do with art, or with activism?
What I mainly expect is not to answer these questions, but to make them sharper and deeper and more urgent.