There are revolutionary moments of politics that can be most appropriately described as spiritual moments. These are the moments when people are willing to risk their lives while resisting oppressive power. In this paper we address spirits of resistance in a general way, but also as manifested at particular moments in three contemporary resistance movements in England, India, and Palestine. Our intention is not to explain such moments, not to analyze the motivations of those involved, but to follow them in the fashion of nomadic science, critically drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari. In our conclusion we argue that the value of spirits of resistance should be upheld in the face of intellectual strategies to tame them, as it is these moments that best guarantee freedom, whether or not resistance is ‘successful’ .

No abstract

No abstract

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. The political public of representative democratic r egimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularization of culture and the democratization of politics. A governmentalist approach understands political media technologies not as aberrations in the light of democratic theory but as the practices of ª actually existingº representative democracy. Genuine popular democracy does not exist, fully formed, in the publics constituted by the media technologies but is most likely to flourish in popular culture and through media technologies.

No abstract