Paula really wants me to join in with the current Storybox exercise we’re all working on right now, which I don’t usually do cos I’m always typing away doing administrative stuff. This time is no different, but because I want to act as part of the group, I’ll cheat. It’s about how you negotiate your identity with people in public, so here’s one I prepared earlier.
October 2004 Archives
Most often, silence in a blog means that HEAPS of stuff is going on. It’s half true with me; when things aren’t exploding in all directions, I’m trying to recover, almost catatonic for hours. Of course, there’s Storybox stuff, which is continually blowing my mind, and a lot of it is about stuff that doesn’t make it to the screen. That sounds kind of obvious, but it never really occurred to me.
Season 5 of Buffy is much, much better than I’d remembered. Skanky fun with the splendiferous Glorificus! Retroactive Dawnie! “Fool for Love”! And the “Sacrifice” theme music in “The Gift” is the saddest thing in the whole world — at the crucial moment, I cried and cried. I couldn’t bring myself to watch “The Body” and “Forever”, though. A bit too raw, right now.
Then there’s the challenge of trying to focus my interests into a workable Masters topic. Annotating urban spaces; writing from “the margins”; the rhetoric and poetics of design; negotiating design instrumentality in social activity; concepts of literacy; concepts of virtuality in design use; mediation; the horror and therapy of desubjectifying design. Head. About. To. Explode. In a good way.
In the past couple of days I’ve noticed that many of you here in Australia are wondering how you can look your “fellow Australians” in the eye after they returned our pack of lying, slimy leaders to government. I’m struck by this recurring motif of the averted look between citizens in the space of the nation.
I’ve felt this way too, but not recently; the last time I was explicitly uneasy about “looking fellow Australians in the eye” was in the aftermath of the 1996 Federal Election, during the rise of Hansonism. As a wave of protofascist rhetoric swept the national stage, I felt trapped in my home, unwilling to venture outside — not because racism was somehow new to me and therefore so shocking, but because its rhetorical overload in the public sphere was a constant reminder of what everyone was thinking about us. We didn’t want to be reminded. During this period, in their polite and leafy suburb, my parents had dogshit very purposefully left on their front doorstep to remind them of their place in this country. Truth be told, we always knew what people were thinking. The cultural and economic machinations that had been churning underneath the national stage. We just didn’t want to be reminded.
It’s not as if I should have had many illusions about what had been going on — that’s how reminders work. 1996 is a useful marker in this regard. That was the election in which the Greens ran racist television commercials about how “the Japs are chopping down our forests”. Yes, the Greens, whose reactionary, nationalist policies on population control left the rules of the game unquestioned, and which brought them into contact with crackpot, ultra-right-wing groups. Nice one.
1996 was the election Labor lost after more than a decade of government — years in which they used their mafioso-relationship with the labour movement to better discipline their constituencies: freezing wage rises and calling in the fucking armed forces to break up strikes. Oh, and and the big one that’s disappeared down the memory hole: Labor were the ones who introduced mandatory detention for asylum seekers in 1992. (And the Immigration Ministers responsible for its implementation were in the Left of the party, at that. Do the words “not to be trusted” mean anything to you?) It was all for the “national good”, a nicely paradoxical and sickening modulation of the increasingly global logics of capital.
My horror at hearing such a setup being given a clearer, more blatant ideological expression in the form of Howard’s agenda and Hanson’s rhetoric provided an opportunity that I never took. It was a chance to face things more squarely, to push the urge to avert my eyes from “fellow citizens” into another territory, into a more practical critique of citizenship and the mystificatory national theatre of politics itself, those unquestioned contexts that underpinned all the machinations that had preceded that moment. Instead, my disgust at my “fellow Australians” actually left our relationship as “citizens of the nation” intact, papering over the real forces at work, and leading me into a spiral of depression and political disengagement that’ll take me the rest of my life to come to terms with.
So in the face of this latest public manifestation of cancerous politics, we have an opportunity to take our disgust into more politically enabling territory, to question the rules of the game. We need to remember what this election is a reminder of, rather than let it sink us. We can pick up this horrible sign and see it as a manifestation of how things actually work in the world rather than a cataclysmic mystification, and run with it, right out of the park, with its neatly circumscribed zones and prescribed playing positions for our “fellow citizens”, and cause a ruckus — play outside the rules, with no respect for boundaries. Soccer riot!
Some of you might remember that last year I dedicated Starship’s “We Built This City” to those struggling in Miami against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit: “It’s just another Sunday, in a tired old street / Police have got the choke hold — oh, and we just lost the beat”. I noted that the song was originally written for John Farnham, which took some of you towards a radical reappreciation of Farnham’s 1985 MOR pop-rock hit “You’re The Voice”.
Those same peeps know that the Australian Electoral Commission is using “You’re The Voice” to advertise today’s Federal Election. Riding the wave of its recent rehabilitation an Australian Idol group finalist singalong (i.e. a performative proxy for Christian fundamentalist rapture), the song is played as a vacuous anthem for civic-minded smugness and integration… right?
But now I must join in solidarity with you ironic-radical fans, and indulge your perverse urge to read the song against the grain, to declare that it can’t be reduced to electoralist duty and parliamentary fetishism. Perhaps it’s because “You’re The Voice” is so vague: “We have the chance to turn the pages over,” “How long can we look at each other / Down the barrel of a gun?”. Unlike the Beastie Boys’ recent clumsy “political” turn, the very vagueness that can lend “You’re The Voice” to tacky civic platitudes can also project it into a radical netherworld of possibility. Every time I see the AEC TV commercial and hear “We’re not gonna sit in silence / We’re not gonna live with fear,” I hear the song overflow its context. Into insurrection.
Try finding any magazine cover like this today, let alone a computer magazine. It’s by Robert Tinney.
I’ve always been quite partial to early ’80s magazines about personal computers, like BYTE. Lately I’ve been turning to them, as I did at the time, as a form of pure entertainment. Really. It’s poetry. All these talismanic words — outdated jargon and now-extinct brands like Valdocs, UCSD p-System, S-100 bus, Sage IV. Before the sedimentation of the current desktop metaphors and hardware tropes, the world of personal computing was far more variegated, full of strange byways and quixotic efforts at world domination with products that were at turns strange and sexy.
And then there was the romance of graphical user interfaces. But back then GUIs were still a crazy idea. Maybe I was born to be a half-assed interface designer, because more than 20 years ago, I drew the headers in my diary in shaky ballpoint to mimic the window title bars of the Apple Lisa, for fuck’s sake. The then-still-unformed vocabularies of interface culture really fascinated me. So when Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore archive takes me back to see how Apple reinvented Xerox’s groundbreaking ’70s desktop concepts, I don’t so much see a prophetic reverse-echo of today’s desktop boredom, but rather a snapshot of a state of flux that was much stranger than I remember.
[Apple Lisa interface test, c.1980]
And Windows? It was shit. And I’m no crazy Mac zealot with no sense of history: I was a Windows 1.0 user in 1985 — I’ve done my time, baby.
[Microsoft Windows interface test, c.1983]
Completely nuts: the GUIdebook.
Ah, my coolest birthday present was Lena getting me the entirety of Buffy on DVD. I’m looking forward to revisiting Season 5…
This week I attended an interesting training session on “community development with refugee communities” that was facilitated by the Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors. We were warned that some bits (i.e. working through accounts of torture, etc.) might be upsetting, but what proved to be the most contentious and upsetting for all of us was a discussion about the consequences for communities in the wake of state terrorism — consequences which (according to the STARTTS presentation) included “the devaluing of human life” amongst a population.
A colleague, F, found it really offensive to suggest that some communities simply get used to the idea that “life is cheap”, regardless of whether certain conditions are forced on them by certain regimes. She was convinced that there must be an essentially noble, unassailable moral core, a reflective, individual interiority of mourning that remained in the face of the “exterior”, social conventions of “unsurprise” that would be required in a context of constant death. I’m unconvinced by this kind of humanism, but really sympathised with how it challenged the self-fulfilling “nominalism of victimisation” that many of us identified in the presentation, i.e. “the survivors of state terrorism just end up devaluing human life; that’s what they do” — a story in which the constantly contested processes of social life end up disappearing, and you end up with a pat classification, the yoke of a social typology.
What many of us found so disturbing was the position that “value” could both implicitly and explicitly occupy in such rhetoric. What we found so alarming was the chain of “value” that could so easily frame such a definition of social pathology: the valuing of the capacity to value life. “Those people don’t value life like we do.” A biopolitical mania. In a liberal discourse of care, the implication of this meta-valuation is that “we” must “enlighten” these damaged zombie peoples about the civilising role of our institutions of healthcare, etc.
The first thing we can unpack is the unacknlowedged similarities between these supposedly opposed regimes of value: under state terrorism (which Western capitalist states surely don’t practise, oh no), torturers often employ the services of health professionals in order to ensure to continued life of those tortured, so that torture can be prolonged indefinitely. As Dinesh reminded us at the Italian Effect, life is valuable to the torturer. Often, the torturers are themselves health professionals.
Perhaps the next step is not to reactively enshrine survivors of torture as essentially noble and “civilised” (which ultimately reinforces a Western capitalist frame of reference), but to wrestle with liberal narratives of “civilising care” on a terrain that actually faces real difference. If people who have survived long conditions of everyday death (wherever they come from) find themselves alienated by Western capitalist rhetorics and institutions of health care, perhaps they should be listened to, rather than glibly brought into the light of unquestioned “civilisation”. I’m thinking that some people might either immediately associate doctors with torture and control, or they might find Western capitalist rhetorics of care somewhat “hysterical”, or somewhat ominous. I’m by no means suggesting that people engaged in activities with newly arrived migrants and refugees should encourage preventable deaths out of some misplaced “respect”, but that “our” local regimes of biopolitics and value need to be problematised by this encounter, too. What is hysterical and ominous about the liberal capitalist modulations of how to value human life? How much is the image of a fit and healthy body politic, ready to defend The Fatherland, a bizarre fetish that suits certain interests? How much are certain powers’ preoccupations with sustaining life also able, in the current context, able to create stunning and seemingly permanent exceptions to these regimes of care, like detention centres for asylum seekers, and how much are they sides of the same coin? We need to go way beyond ideas about “hypocrisy”.
Of course, the certainties of “local values” need to be unpacked — beyond the fact that the forces of the benevolent Health State might wage state terror abroad and incarcerate visitors without papers, the legacies of colonialism (hellooooo the attempted extermination of indigenous people) and the spectre of new and continued endocolonialisms (hellooooo the enforced poverty, policing and deaths in custody of indigenous people) mean that the inside/outside, foreign/local oppositions are never tenable anyway: the socially disorganising strategies of state terror, and thus survivors of torture and genocide, are never far away.
Finally, how can we account for the differing modulations of “valuing human life” in a global, systemic context? In what contexts are various notions of value tenable and convenient for the continued functioning of various planetary regimes? Just how does “extending the hand of civilising care” contribute, then, to planetary justice? I thus really like the fact that as noted below, NaturallySweet’s list of things to do (rather than demands) for changing the world includes a desire to “stop the earthlings suffer from war and torture” (my emphasis). This flavour of expression isn’t some stratospheric Negrian move towards demanding global citizenship of some higher power, but a young Afghan woman’s matter of fact decentering of the Western liberal rhetoric of “helping those less fortunate (and more foreign) than us”.
Sorry, this has been a long “note to self”. I have no idea how this would relate to a Marxist approach to this kind of “value”, if at all. Or how the new-fangled, Agambenian approach to biopolitics could be of, uh, value. That would involve actually reading something…
Yep, that’s a line from one of the blogs in the Storybox project. The workshops thus far have been so cool, with young participants from the Sudanese, Burundian, Congan and Afghan communities confounding my assumptions. I have the feeling that this will be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. Say hello to Elednor, NaturallySweet, Marium, Khalahcoco, mz_blue_eyez and Ibasyana. More will appear later.
One of the most interesting things that the workshops have raised is the nature of “the public”, and how power is involved in its construction. A lot of what we’re doing with the project is a strategic negotiation of public/private distinctions, which then extends to an explicit engagement with, and critique of, ideas about the public sphere, or the concrete realities the apparently-really-existing public sphere. This isn’t just the preconceived rhetorical aims and objectives behind the project; I’m talking about what I think the young people are actually doing — this stuff has come up in really concrete ways, like how they’re engaging with concepts of value in terms of, say, Google, warblogs and mainstream news outlets, and how this relates to their own writings and interventions. Hurrah!
