May 2006 Archives

If all goes well, I’ll be presenting the following in Boston this November, as part of a panel about Doctor Who’s relationship with the field of international relations:

Rats in the Sewers: Doctor Who and the Underbelly of the Nation-State

Doctor Who’s fascination with interplanetary diplomacy and conflict, and also for repeated alien invasions of Earth, initially suggests that it might neatly allegorise the theatre of nation-state actors that classical international relations attempts to describe. The 1970 story “The Curse of Peladon” is a perfect example, focusing on the intrigue around a planet’s imminent incorporation into the Galactic Federation — an allegory of Britain’s entry into the European Union. However, even in the middle of its most state-centric phase — the Third Doctor’s official association with the British arm of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce — Doctor Who nevertheless touched on lines of conflict that exist transversally to the supposedly organic and naturalised interests of nation-states, thus suggesting a molecular critique of international relations. Disruptive contestations of sovereignty appear from below the established IR topography, most notably from the reptillian Silurians and Sea Devils — indigenous, prehistoric claimants to the Earth who rise from the depths.

In fact, many of classic Doctor Who’s more gothic and less obviously IR-related concerns nevertheless trace the uncanny flows of power that cross the nation-state. For example, against a vivid background of Victorian London’s sewers in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, racial panic dramatises an obvious displacement of all that is rendered underground by the state: class war, for example. So in the wake of debates about Fredric Jameson’s remarks on Third World literature, national allegory and world systems theory, it might be suggested that Doctor Who is indeed an allegory of “international relations”, but a leaky and troublesome one, whose uncanny tranversality to the nation-state renders IR problematic.

Since my trip to the States is contingent on funding for something else, it’ll be a relatively inexpensive lark. Note that despite my use of the term “molecular”, my take on “transversality” is a completely literal one, rather than Guattarian as such. But as long as somebody can convince me of it (and explain it to me!), I’m still open to a geophilosophical or schizoanalytic approach. Oh, and I’ll be sure to pop Ben Aaronovitch’s poco revisionist take on Doctor Who history, too.

[ tags: doctor-who, international-relations ]

Our second experience of Videotage’s RecRoom nights at the Cattle Depot was all about blocking out the visual to appreciate the aural, so the lack of light made it somewhat hard to take photos — especially given my aversion to using my awful, puny flash. But I took photos anyway, relying on my (un)steady hands and the odd prop to hold two-second exposures. Here’s the photoset. Sebastian and Florian bought these whacky foam floating aids for use in swimming pools, and scattered them amongst cushions on the floor for people to lean their body-parts on. I felt like I was floating in a tank.

Now the Cattle Depot Artists’ Village, as its name suggests, used to be a slaughterhouse. I don’t know anything about such stuff; those drains/troughs that run through every space in Cattle Depot, indoors and outdoors — were they for water, or blood? Hmmm.

[ tags: cattle-depot, hong-kong, recroom, sound, videotage ]

On Mel’s prompting, that post about Benjamin’s whorehouse is now going to turn into a paper at the Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity conference in a few months, soon after I get back from Hong Kong:

Zero-Hour at the “Whorehouse”:
Making and unmaking Benjamin’s state of emergency

What would it mean to truly act — to intervene in the seemingly endless parade of depressing incidents we call “history”? What kind of subjectivity is required to push events out of their temporal linearity? Against the tendency to simply aestheticise Walter Benjamin’s thought, these kinds of questions serve as a stubborn reminder that Benajmin’s approach to history is predicated on social transgression. In this paper, I consider Benjamin’s model of the historical materialist subject against the grain of his own declarations. For Benjamin, the historical materialist “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history,” resisting the metaphorical “whore” in historicism’s “bordello” — a distressing model for intervention. How, then, can protagonists of history intervene in terms other than masculinist prowess?

I argue that Benjamin’s phallocentric investment in instrumentalism can be undone, or inverted, by grappling with what he describes as the radical void of thought’s Stillstellung (a Benjaminian neologism translated as an “arrest”, or more provocatively, as a “zero-hour”) — a suspended interval of interruption that suggests an altogether different relationship to instrumentality. For Benjamin, the world is revealed in this zero hour, and this revalatory moment can usefully provide an opening into an ethics of trauma, instead of the discourse of mastery. I reread Benjamin’s account of historical-materialist subjecthood in terms of recent traumatic events, such as 2005’s racist, anti-Arab mob violence in Sydney’s Cronulla: what does it mean, in ethical and political terms, to experience or respond to racist violence? I consider the negotiation of such events as an affective, ethico-political communication with “the world” that can ambivalently lead to desubjectification, or what Slavoj Zizek partially re-instrumentalises as Lacanian “subjective destititution”.

[ tags: conference, racism, trauma, sexism, cronulla, politics, walter-benjamin ]

The Centre for Cultural Research’s next seminar at the University of Western Sydney deals with derelict urban spaces:

Helen Armstrong, Adjunct Professor, CCR
“Disturbing Landscapes: arguing for derelict sites and wastelands in contemporary cities”

18 May, 2-4.30pm, Superintendent’s Cottage, Building ET, Parramatta Campus, University of Western Sydney

In growing cities such as Sydney, contemporary urban landscapes are fast becoming uniform landscapes of consumption punched through by conduit landscapes of infrastructure. The most regrettable change is the loss of derelict sites and wastelands. Urban designers are keen to reconfigure such disturbing places, in their quest to achieve attractive and consolidated cities. They also hope to lure the so-called affluent ‘Creative Class’ by marketing an urban pseudo sense of place, a commodity manufactured by the Heritage Industry. Most often people see derelict sites and wastelands as ugly and unpleasant. As the French landscape architect, Christophe Girot (2004), describes them, they are ‘landscapes of contempt’. But should we be so contemptuous of these time-laden landscapes? They present time in penetrating ways, providing uncanny insights that could never emerge from the thin landscapes of the Spectacle City or the ersatz ‘placeness’ carefully orchestrated for the so-called Creative Class. The prevailing qualities of disturbing landscapes are the uncomfortable memories of flawed dreams and visions. Vast derelict industrial landscapes resonate with messages of recent failure, possibly explaining why they are being erased so quickly in growing cities. It is in shrinking cities, particularly in former soviet Europe, where urban voids and wastelands are increasing, that we see new micro-tactics associated with the return of social concerns along with innovative approaches to future landscapes. This talk will explore the value of disturbing derelict sites and wastelands.

This sparked a memory: in my pre-teen years, I used to visit Sydney’s Chinatown far more often than I do now, and my favourite place there was the site of what I think is now my university library. But at the time, it was the most fantastic mountain of Victorian-era rubble and twisted metal, in a shell of semi-standing walls. It was the most dramatic place I knew — even better than a Doctor Who quarry — and I’d frolic there for as long as I’d be allowed. Of course, my favourite movie of the time was Tarkovsky’s Stalker.

[ tags: ruins, urbanism ]

I’ve finally managed to get a decent domestic net connection in Hong Kong. Too much to catch up on, so I’ll just mention the ecstatic set that Bangkok electro god Cyndi Seui played at Videotage on Friday night. It reminded me of Daft Punk. When they were good. Here’s the Flickr set.

[ tags: hong-kong, videotage, electro, cyndi-seui ]

Don’t you remember? Rock and roll.

[ tags: border-control, borders, immigration, mayday ]

In the wake of the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, everyone’s talking as if Stephen Colbert is going to wind up like Stephen Fry’s character Dietrich in V for Vendetta. I hate to state the obvious, but while I enjoyed Colbert’s somewhat longwinded routine, it’s always useful to remember why Vendetta’s Dietrich (despite the incredulity of many who’ve seen the film) even thought it was possible to get away with his lampooning of England’s dictator: the jester’s insults are usually tolerated because they act as an affective valve in the sovereign’s court. In the world of the court, comically speaking “truthiness” to power is given an institutionalised function. But beyond helpfully managing the flow of humours, that truth itself is recuperated: the fool is often appreciated because his dialogue with the sovereign makes the latter wiser, allowing them to perfect their rule. And if that’s is the extent of everyone’s enthusiasm about speaking truth to power, we’re in fucking trouble.

The first thing that came to mind after watching Colbert’s press corp gig was a scene in that Jim Carrey movie, Liar Liar, in which he is forced to speak to his boss while only being able to speak the truth:

Colleague: Why don’t you tell Mr. Allan, well, what do you think of him?

Reede: He’s a pedantic, pontificating, pretentious bastard. A belligerent old fart. A worthless, steaming pile of cow dung. Figuratively speaking.

Silence. Allan suddenly bursts out laughing. Everyone else laughs.

Allan: That’s the funniest damn thing l’ve ever heard! You’re a real card, Reede! l love a good roast!

…

Allan: l like your style, Reede. That’s what this stuffy company needs — a little irreverence!

Reede: Good! l’ll see you later, dickhead!

Allan: Dickhead! Priceless!

Of course, Carrey’s character eventually accomplishes the cheesy ethical goal of the film — getting his son to trust him again — but he has to work a lot harder than just “telling the truth”. This isn’t an attempt to diminish Colbert’s achievement, but a warning against its uncritical, liberal and ultimately recuperable celebration. And while we’re on the subject of Mr Carrey, doesn’t anyone else think that the first half of Fun with Dick and Jane, with its spiral into racialised and criminalised poverty — witness the scene where Carrey’s lack of ID and bruised-jaw speech impediment gets him deported with a truckload of paperless hispanic immigrants — is one of the best things ever?

Update: sure, you can’t stretch the metaphor of the medieval court infinitely, but hey, I think civil society and the public sphere in general are effectively hazy extensions of the sovereign’s court, anyway, so there…

[ tags: comedy, jesters, jim-carrey, medieval, speaking-truth-to-power, stephen-colbert, truth ]