[ tags: liberalism, policing, race, racism, tolerance ]
December 2005 Archives
In Britain:
Cor!
[ tags: urbanism, migration, race, refugees, policing, assimilation, asylum-seekers, police, ghettos, borders ]
Latest in a series of thinkings-aloud…
Okay, so I mentioned the literal and symbolic logic of recognition in this part of my Blogtalk paper (which sounds increasingly incoherent each time I reread it), recalling the unusually traumatic difficulty we had with the following kinds of tests in the Storybox blogging project I ran last year with young refugee people:
Such tests are known as CAPTCHAs — “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and are commonly used by web services that involve social communications, including Blogger, the blogging system we were using. They act as a gateway to prevent inhuman communication, stopping automated scripts from procuring accounts for transmitting spam.
“What does this mean?” the young people would ask me when confronted with an avant garde-looking CAPTCHA. “Why do we have to answer this… question?”
“To… prove that you’re human,” I replied in a whisper, […] realising the gravity of the situation…
And you may recall my recent thoughts on Alan Turing’s original logics of recognition, and the weird links between recognisable gender and the concepts of the human and the artificially intelligent.
Now get this — it’s Chris Hables Gray, in Cyborg Citizen:
The complications of cyborg citizenship call for a cyborg citizen Turing test to determine which entities can actually participate in our discourse community and which cannot.
Cor!
[ tags: alan-turing, artificial-intelligence, CAPTCHA, citizenship ]
I’ve had requests for downloadable versions of these and other graphics, but I’ve realised that the printable files are currently huuuuge and unoptimised, so this will take some time. Sorry!
[ tags: australia, cronulla, gangs, nationalism, race, racialisation, racism ]
[ tags: australia, nationalism, race, racism ]
When I’m feeling down, I don’t listen to Malcolm X speeches or whatever to make me feel better — I draw my inspiration from the X-Men’s encounters with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. In this snippet from X2, Nightcrawler and Mystique, who both look like blue, reptilian devils, talk about passing:
Nightcrawler: Excuse me. They say you can imitate anyone. Even their voice.
Mystique (in Nightcrawler’s voice): Even their voice.
Nightcrawler: Then why not stay in disguise all the time? You know — look like everyone else?
Mystique (evenly): Because we shouldn’t have to.
I’m so in love with her right now. We need some of her angry, defiant dignity. Minus the attempts at genocide. :)
[ tags: assimilation, comics, films, passing, pop-culture, race, racism, x-men ]
For a while now, I’ve been curious about terms that leverage the word “public”, like “the public”, or “the public sphere”, etc. An excellent opportunity: “our” public broadcaster informs me tonight that yesterday in Maroubra, “Lebanese gangs terrorised the public”. Terrorised. The public. The otherly-complexioned people who were beaten the fuck out of and terrorised on Sunday by 5000 white people chanting “No more Lebs!” were definitely not part of “the public”. (As my brother suggests, perhaps the racist mob was “the public”.) Hmmm. To quote some old comrades:
The public.
They do not exist.
They are dangerous to your health.
A couple of days later, the awful significance of the Cronulla riot seems destined for evaporation. Short memory.
ADDED: finally reeled in my unusual, let-it-all-hang-out comments structure on the homepage, because the last couple of threads were waaay to long to sustain that format. In case anyone thought the original format was there to equitably share the space with my readers (or to offer an inflated platform for trolls), sadly, no: I was just lonely, and wanted to be seen as more social. :)
[ tags: australia, cronulla, maroubra, public, publics, race, racism ]
Nazi, Nazi, Nazi — oi, oi, oi!
This country makes me want to cry:
And:
Fucking burn it down, all of it. The whole fucking country.
+ + +
I’ve detested beach culture all my life, mostly because of various issues of racial embodiment. Or more accurately, I’m afraid of the beach. Beaches are the place I’ve felt least welcome in this country, on a palpable, visceral level, and it’s something that white people in Australia will never understand. I grew up seeing the troubled relation of Racial Others to The Beach used as an explicit, rhetorical tool of white privilege, and also in ways that got under my skin, in the Fanonian sense — we took it for granted that we were inferior on the beach.
But things have changed. Patterns of migration and settlement in Sydney, as well as the oppressive divisions wrought by the management of this city’s social flows, have brought an ambivalent quality to large, contemporary migrant communities: ignorance of “their place in society”. Of course, people aren’t stupid — anyone can read the signs, and be fucking angry about them, which is what’s going to increasingly happen, and with good reason. But for various reasons, many contemporary migrant kids have not grown up as a cowering, grateful and atomised minority that acknowledges its own inferiority in the racial scheme of things. Thus, I think they usefully lack the sense of unentitlement that Australian beach culture (amongst other things) has insistently attempted to encode for them. They’ve dodged the interpellation, and will keep crossing boundaries into spaces where they’re not welcome. This isn’t heroic so much as socially constitutive, but I admire it. Nobody’s going off into the night. Not after this.
+ + +
On a more wistful and contradictory note, my hatred and fear of beach culture has always offset by a lifelong love of surf music, from the Pixies to the Beach Boys, and which can be traced back to my uncle’s old Atlantics album. (The reason I had that album at all is another story from which race, I suspect, is never far.) Of course, the Atlantics — those Australian surf icons — were a bunch of wog boys (international readers: note that in Australia, the word “wog” has been partially reclaimed by Mediterranean immigrants), and the musical culture of surf instrumentals always had a Mediterranean influence.
Funnily enough, look at the wave on the cover of these wog boys’ debut album: of course, it’s Cronulla.
+ + +
ADDED — The Australian nation-state can now consider itself on notice from the big black cat:
Coming to eat you. So fuckin’ angry and shit.
[ tags: australia, beach, beach-culture, cronulla, race, racism, riot, riots, violence ]
Oh, forgot to post about the Suburban Sista Soundz community music gig we put on at the Metro. It was the public culmination of a couple of years of ICE’s urban music programmes, and it fucking went OFF!
(More photos here.) As I’ve said before, I’m so proud to be associated with this kind of thing — unlike my recent creepy encounter with “affable personas”, these community programmes try to navigate the territories between “training” (i.e. pragmatically leveraging the frameworks of viable-citizen-formation) and the transgressive joys of expression — all via brain-melting hip-hop/R’n’B zones of intensity, and a palpable engagement with uh, reality. For these young people, I’d call it surviving, in style.
[ tags: community, hiphop, rnb, suburbansistas, music, concert ]
Saw a couple of great films at the Sydney Arab Film Festival: Duraid Lanham’s Al Hodoud (Borders) and Saverio Costanzo’s Private. Al Hodoud follows a man who has lost his passport and is thus consigned to a whacky bureaucratic netherzone — basically, the kind of story Spielberg botched with The Terminal. (It also costarred the incomparable Raghda.) However, I thought it was absolutely bizarre that the Lord Mayor of Parramatta, in his official welcome to the screening, had the temerity — especially in such a context — to suggest that in Australia, we had built a nation that was largely without borders! Um, did I miss the bit in in 1994 where a Minister from your faction of the Australian Labor Party oversaw the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers who arrive without papers, Mr Mayor? Or the bit ten (unrepentant) years later, when your Shadow Minister for Immigration, also from your faction, basically told refugee advocates that they, unlike his unfortunate self, didn’t actually have to live with refugees, otherwise they’d change their minds about them? A borderless Australia? Jesus Fucking Christ, mate.
Oh, and Private — a harrowing account of a Palestinian family sticking it out under an Israeli Defence Force confiscation of their house — really got me thinking about the domesticities of occupation. Terrifying.
[ tags: australia, australian-labor-party, border-control, borders, film, immigration, mandatory-detention, occupation, palestine ]
“What’s wrong with theory?”
— Altaira Morbius, Forbidden Planet
[ tags: film, forbidden-planet, pop-culture, science-fiction ]
Now available at the Antipopper Store!
No comment.
EDITED: Actually, I will say something. As some of you know, I’ve spent numerous years in the disturbing world of advertising. But in my time amongst the Evil Empires, I have never seen as many people in one room so visibly “on the make” as I did at the Cultural Research Network’s PreFix postgraduate and early career researcher professional development day. It was shocking. Part of me puts this down to a delayed reaction to the marketisation of the university, coupled with the rhetoricising functions of the academy, which results in the bizarre spectacle of people suggesting that one “cultivate an affable persona” in order to get ahead in academia. But I don’t think such factors quite account for that aroma of desperate careerism.
[ tags: careerism, neoliberalism, subjectivation, university ]
