Over the weekend an old friend wrote me to make sure that I don't like Andrew Sullivan now. I don't; his opinions are by and large awful, even if on many important issues he's slowly switched to "our side" since 2001. But on isolated issues his coverage can be very strong, as it is this morning on the now-illegal protest march in Tehran. Just look at the size of that crowd. (UPDATE: Video from BBC Persia. Wow.) (UPDATE 2: Mousavi is at the rally.)

'Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark's clock,' currently the leading contender for greatest news story of all time.

Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.

More coverage at urban-resources.net and greg.org.

These guys've been in the news before.

Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.

Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.

...

A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

greg.org also has an interview with one of the group's spokespeople about the underground cinema project.

There's still more on les UX at Wikipedia. This is so cool. I'm beside myself.

My friend R. Vu bids adieu to Utopia. (Warning: he drops bombs. F-bombs.) I'll probably write more about this later, but this:

So give up utopia, give up hope. Give up the gods, finally. What then? I submit the following declaration, appropriately vulgar:

We Are Fucked.

Fucked: there will not be flying cars and foie gras for everyone. Fucked: the revolution will always take place somewhere else. Fucked: even self-righteous victimhood is incoherent, because there is always someone more fucked than you, and your pet huddled masses. Fucked: death is unavoidable, and you are not going to heaven for ’saving’ future generations. They too are fucked. The ‘we,’ used without reservation, without respect to age, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation, unites us all.

reminds me of studies that show that merely mentioning death tends to make people more conservative, as well as the increasingly commonplace assertion that environmental pessimism makes people less likely to care about the environment. (If we be fucked, I guess people say, make the most of it.) Can there be a mass philosophy of "abject humility" that doesn't reduce to "nasty and brutish"? Doesn't the multitude need some Imaginary to believe in and work for, even if it's endlessly denied and perpetually preempted?

Does Schopenhauerian resignation make people act like Schopenhauer?

On the plane I got a chance to look through Hardt and Negri's follow-up to Empire (blogged previously), Multitude, which I enjoyed quite a bit. In terms of what I sometimes loosely imagine to be my project, the first chapter ("War") is clearly the most helpful, and not coincidentally the bit I read most carefully:

War really became absolute only with the technological development of weapons that made possible for the first time mass and even global destruction. Weapons of global destruction break the modern dialectic of war. War has always involved the destruction of life, but in the twentieth century this destructive power reached the limits of the pure production of death, represented symbolically by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

If you've talked to me about my thoughts of apocalypse before, you know that I think of these as two importantly distinct figurations central to the way the world has been spatialized in late capitalism—Tribulation and Rapture—though for Hardt and Negri's purposes that distinction isn't necessarily all that important at the moment.

They go on:

The capacity of genocide and nuclear destruction touches directly on the very structure of life, corrupting it, perverting it. The sovereign power that controls such means of destruction is a form of biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death—the death not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps of all being. When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly ontological.

War thus seems to be heading at once in two opposite directions: it is, on the one hand, reduced to police action and, on the other, raised up to an absolute, ontological level by technologies of global destruction. These two movements, however, are not contradictory: the reduction of war to police action does not take away but actually confirms its ontological dimension. The thinning of the war function and the thickening of the police function maintain the ontological stigmata of absolute annihilation: the war police maintain the threat of genocide and nuclear destruction as their ultimate foundation.

What's most important, I think, about the impulse Hardt and Negri are identifying is that in either case the specter of Tribulation/Auschwitz/genocide or Rapture/Hiroshima/nuclear war wind up motivating Empire always in the same direction, that is, the repeated and "necessary" application of bios-preserving violence in the post-colonial spaces it has incorporated into itself but yet still keeps perpetually at a remove.

The later chapters about the Utopian possibilities of the networked multitude are interesting, though it's probably this first chapter that I'll most need to return to at some point.