Bibliographic software is the shiznit!
August 2005 Archives
Or, how to procrastinate — first a lovely chat with Camel, and then a ghoulish pun about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, inspired by Ange and Ms Minogue:
I’m really not trying to “make a joke” out of it — just trying to be, as Sandy says, simultaneously earnest and ironic.
[ tags: biopolitics, kylie-minogue, menezes, operation-kratos, police, security, shooting, war-on-terror ]
Latest on the Department of Homeland Industrial Relations Security: the following is for Deborah, in our ongoing conversation about nationalism and the labour movement; it’s from “Face to Face With the Monster of the Week”, a whacky science fiction play I wrote a few years ago about the racist terror of liberalism’s civilising project, amongst other things (e.g. faciality, “asian inscrutability”, the cultural politics of emotion, etc.).
INTERROGATOR: You know, sweetie, it says here that industrial relations are getting worse in this country.
MONSTER (sighing): All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: But what about over in China? Over there, you guys make political prisoners do everything. Everything’s made by a political prisoner, over there. No feelings for human rights. No feelings. (Looks accusingly at Monster.)
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: Things look pretty okay here. Except here it says that there’s a three-hundred thousand “outworkers” in Australia — y’know, those women who sew clothes at home for big companies. Says they get paid crap.
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: But why don’t they just quit and get another job? Or join a union? Nobody’s stopping them. It’s still legal. Why don’t they say anything?
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
INTERROGATOR: It says here that most of them don’t know any English. Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? They don’t know about human rights. Here, there’s human rights. It makes us look bad when they’re ignorant.
MONSTER: All bad all sad.
INTERROGATOR: It says some of them are scared of getting abused or raped by the contractors if they don’t work enough. That’s a bit full on. Why don’t they go to the authorities or anything? Probably ’cause they’re cheating the tax system, huh? Not like honest Australian workers…
MONSTER: All bad, all sad.
It’s one of the few bits of (false) “normality” in the middle of a mass of pulpy, “bad English” dialogue, like: “The information — you have it in your fingernails, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”. Besides being a joke, the latter was an attempt to perform a kind of “decomposed” language — the colonial humanist Interrogator has an inbred, “collapsed” and weirdly elliptical version of English that can never keep up with his character’s own appearances of desperate majoritarian properness, to the point where it ironically begins to resemble the stereotypical “broken English” ascribed to non-Anglo migrants and “the natives”. (I was imagining a ruling class white South African judge reading mistranslated Heidegger, full of twisted, passive clauses. In a way, it was an exaggeration of the worst aspects of my own “normal” writing.) Looking back, I just feel sorry for the actors who had to mouth it all, word perfect. At least they got to have fun shoving huge amounts of barbequed pork down each other’s throats on stage, night after night…
[ tags: industrial-relations, internationalism, labour, labour-movement, language, nationalism, race, theatre, unaustralian, unions ]
Back on the labour movement video trail: I’m currently watching an old documentary entitled “The Destruction of the Industrial West”, which is all about protectionism and the threat of “cheap Third World labour”. The only real arguments against protectionism are made by Third World bosses. Even when poverty and exploitation are presented via “Third World” union organisers in the film, it is contextualised as an intrinsic Third World pathology, a gangrene on the body of proper industrial relations. Meanwhile, the option of militant internationalism is made completely invisible, its possibility utterly erased. Sure, that’s to be expected in the context of a mainstream TV documentary, but it’s interesting that the film focuses quite strongly on militant clothing workers in the First World, including Belgian women who were occupying their factories and repurposing them into cooperatives. The slogan “VIVE L’OCCUPATION!” is plastered over a repurposed factory. And yet the spectre of nationalism is unrelenting. Unions are presented by their members as a technique of the nation to look after its own, and as a marker of geopolitical superiority. The question of everyday economic survival in the here and now — no small issue when you’re discussing the globalisation of wage labour — is constantly linked to national competitiveness, even by the direct-actionist exponents of radical “self-management”. Wow.
[ tags: unions, labour-movement, nationalism, labour, industrial-relations, protectionism, internationalism ]
Sandy has an account of last night’s talk by Michael Taussig about “the colour of the sacred”, so I’ll avoid further theoretical explication. A couple of my old teachers had been wild about Taussig back in the day, so I thought he’d be suitably a hallucino-theoretical performer, and he didn’t disappoint. That shirt!
All his stories about Bronislaw Malinowski obsessively wearing his meticulous white outfits amidst the chromatic intensities of the tropics got me thinking about the figure of Elijah Snow in Warren Ellis’ Planetary series of comics: the Man In White who presides over the hidden, colourful mysteries of the world, occupying an ambivalent, mediating figure of authority in their uncovering. A far more resonant take on the X-Files and In Search Of’s often drab approach to monsters-of-the-week, this heterotopia of retrofitted pulp fantasies really is colourful, especially in the vernacular sense of their intensity as “tall tales”.
Given that my thesis is now dealing more with the ways in which “the world” is politically modelled in (various approaches to narrative [{and its} aggregation] in) the blogosphere, Planetary might prove quite interesting as another hallucinogenic point of origin for me. Since I’m already counting Grant Morrison and David Lynch as valid philosophers of trauma, what’s another pop culture icon? Oh, how about Joss Whedon?
One thing I was really itching to talk about last night was colour’s relationship to more seemingly formal institutional politics, like concepts of democracy, in addition to Taussig’s interest in the colonial relation in and of itself. In that fantastic Buffy episode “Hush”, the Gentlemen (a bunch of scary fairytale monsters who literally steal the voices of the town of Sunnydale and keep them in a box in the clocktower) really are “gentlemen” — they’re cadaverous versions of the 19th Century bourgeoisie, dressed in black suits, kind of like undertakers-of-the-self.
In his book Men In Black, John Harvey identifies the sudden popularity of black in the early 19th Century as a traumatic marker of the bourgeois democratic revolutions:
What was being mourned? Baudelaire gave a political explanation: ‘And observe that the black frock-coat and the tail-coat may boast not only their political beauty, which is the expression of universal equality, but also their poetic beauty, which is the expression of the public soul.’ For him the black frock-coat was the uniform of the democratic spirit, of all the democratic bourgeois. He said ‘a uniform livery of grief is a proof of equality’. Democracy had killed a precious individuality, and following that death, democratic life could only be ‘an immense procession of undertakers’ mutes, political mutes, mutes in love, bourgeois mutes’.
Interesting. It’s no mistake, then, that the episode, in which the cast is mute for most of its duration, is completely ripe with allegory about the relationship of “communicative reason” to political institutionality. When my friend Natasja was going over the episode with a fine tooth comb for her own paper on “Hush”, she found some amazing little things in freeze-frame: Giles makes some scribbled notes in an attempt to analyse Buffy’s “the Gentlemen are coming by” children’s rhyme that she hears in a dream, including “Political ref — Bill of Rights?”. A split second shot of the local newspaper on Giles’ desk yields a fantastic story in small print:
President Clinton is embroiled once again in scandal after testing positive for the presidency-enhancing drug Crovan. Traces of Crovan were found in Clinton’s urine Monday during a random drug test conducted as part of the Federal Government’s employee testing program. Crovan, an orally administered drug that artifically boosts diplomacy and coalition-building skills, as well as perceived sincerity levels, has been banned from presidential use since the Ford administration…”
Black, mourning, reason, scandal and the politics of democracy. But other than to throw in these allusive suggestions, I’ve not the skill to engage in some of the recent dialogues on democracy nearby.
Oh Glen: Margaret asked a question about fluoro uniforms as the new chromatic marker of work, but I couldn’t really follow Taussig’s answer.
[ tags: baudelaire, colonialism, colour, comics, communication, democracy, ethnography, michael-taussig, planetary, race, television, theory, tv, warren-ellis ]
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“True stories and their fictional spin-offs — especially bloody ones — occupy an enduring spot in western culture.”
Last night I had the good fortune to tech-wrangle at a presentation by Deborah Kingsland, who produces films by street kids in Ethiopia. The outfit behind it all is called Gem TV, and while the whole approach seemed very quixotic, the stuff she showed was pretty mindblowing. Afterwards we had an interesting discussion with other community-based film-makers about content distribution. Head hurts.
[ tags: africa, community-media, deborah-kingsland, ethiopia, film, gem-tv, homeless, television, tv ]
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RSS television. Cool.
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Damn, I had no idea about this essay, in which the hupomnemata (as blog-analogue) makes an appearance (thanks, Bryan).
Today I tried downloading a paper called “The Erasure and Construction of History for the Information Age: Positivism and Its Critics” by the mysterious Ron Day. This is what I got:
It’s actually one of those damn PDFs that only works with Adobe products, but first I thought it was some elaborate joke of Ron’s…
[ tags: adobe, erasure, heidegger, informatics, irony, pdf, ron-day, walter-benjamin ]
