July 2006 Archives

It’s almost been two years since Josh died. I’m not going to be in Sydney for the memorial thingy, but this is something that I wrote to be read out in my absence:

I didn’t know Josh as well as many of you here today, but he definitely left an impression on my life. When Josh was an anarchist, he was really hardcore about it. He half-convinced me that anarchism was a good thing, and that has always stayed with me. But we ended up kind of swapping — he surprised me by subsequently becoming a socialist, and he was hardcore about that, too. Finally, a little more than two years ago, he told me that he supported Michael Moore’s position that Oprah should run for the Presidency of the United States. It was the last thing he ever said to me, and he made me laugh nervously while I actually started thinking about the possibilities of ‘Oprah: Commander In Chief’.

All of this illustrates what everyone already knows: that the best thing about Josh was that whatever he was doing or believed in, he was 100% enthusiastic and energetic about it, and that this spirit brought new, unforseen qualities to those things. I once gave him a book for his birthday, and he later told me that it was “FUCKING AWESOME!”. In my reality, the book was just pretty good, but his infectious enthusiasm was what made it FUCKING AWESOME. Josh could create entire universes with the intensity of his character, with his desire for a better world. Personally, I’d like to visit the universe where there’s a headstone carved with the words ‘JOSH HEUCHAN: HE WAS FUCKING AWESOME’.

Actually, I never really agreed with him.

[ tags: memorial, death ]

The only way I can respond to the events unfolding in Lebanon is to join the worry and panic of my own extended family and friends. Yes, “other” people have their own “days the world changed”, but they’re more like yet more moments that the world has continued to turn. As I said earlier:

When the London tube bombings happened in July, I panicked like many others, thinking of who I knew in London. When one is inextricably bound up in the links that occur in the web of Anglophone countries, one obviously feels these events — not just in terms of a generalised sympathy or solidarity, but in terms of the real, intimately lived relationships that one might have with certain people internationally. One looks up friends, or they check in, etc. When you live in a country that has a lingering imperial relation to Britain and membership in the advanced capitalist world of nation-states, like I do, this reaction is inescapable, whatever your critique of those relations. Because I have friends there.

But part of my own response to the incident in London also reminded me of something I witnessed in the wake of 11 September, 2001: the assumption of a “we”, and the associated assumption that only “we” have a virtual sphere of everyday concern and affiliation that turns to viscerally sympathetic panic when disaster strikes. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, I saw this played out in various online communities and in the blogosphere: the panic of looking for friends and loved ones, and of frantic checkings in, was often lubricated in its public expression by a kind of structural narcissism — a narcissism that implicitly precluded the possibility that when horrible things happen outside of the Anglophone world, say in the Middle East, people there might also undergo a similar panic, and be frantically trying to reach relatives and friends. These “other people” also live in the pores of the Anglophone world — when shit goes down in the Middle East, which is often, there is always a frantic concern played out within the large Arab diasporas in Australia, Britain, the United States, Canada, etc.

With this realisation comes the reflexive recognition that there is a Western disapora, an imagined community whose ethno-national configuration is constantly riven by crisis, but which is usually rendered invisible by its insistent perspectival self-centering.

I think this cuts much deeper than the casual observation that in public discourse in the Anglophone world, “some lives are figured as more important than others”, because I’m talking not just about the values of “propaganda” or “media discourse”, but about the intimate, affective webs of lived social relationships and their abjection/denial in the space of the everyday. Underneath the Eurocentric notion that “other countries don’t have a civil society”, there is also the subconcept that the semi-intimate zone where private meets public — in a non-institutional sense — simply doesn’t exist for “cultural others”, for whom a state of animalistic barbarity is assumed to be natural.

The “Western diaspora’s” default whiteness is one diaspora amongst others. Acknowledging this might go a long way towards building more adequate concepts of solidarity.

[ tags: bombing, diaspora, israel, lebanon, public-sphere, publics, whiteness ]

Had the most awesome day yesterday — we had lunch with Maggie and Hoi Chiu, who live in Kowloon City. Hoi Chiu grew up in the the Kowloon Walled City — Hong Kong’s unpoliced “dead zone” outside British sovereignty, the inspiration for William Gibson’s Idoru, amongst other things, and a constant touchstone in the “storyscape” project Lena and I are doing in Hong Kong for Tracer. Hoi Chiu and Maggie are actors who do socially engaged playback theatre, but on a geek level, the most pressing issue for me is that Maggie played Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Evolution. Fuck!

Hoi Chiu had tons of interesting things to say about his personal geographical history. With a population density 150 times that of New York, and no government to speak of, the Walled City’s architecture was improvised on the spot, basically growing into one huge warren, with connecting doors and tunnels appearing between buildings. You could move into a high-level apartment with windows in each wall, only to find that every wall would be soon be blocked by new, absolutely adjacent buildings, with no space in between. Running water in the Walled City was a dicey affair, and was arbitrarily routed throughout the mini-city by the families who controlled it — it was Hoi Chiu’s job as a child to haul water from the one main ground well, which was cleaner. Ground level was a jungle of leaking water pipes, electricity cables and junk. “It sounds dangerous,” Hoi Chiu said, “but amazingly it all worked, because people just had to cooperate. They made it work.”

[ tags: hong-kong, kowloon-walled-city, playback-theatre, x-men ]

Oops, I forgot to upload photos of the 1 July pro-democracy rally here in Hong Kong. It seemed that the only political tendency not on display was the Chinese Communist Party, whose loyalists held their own rally earlier in the morning, so it was a political free-for-all, featuring liberals, fatcat democrats, ultra-reactionary Guomingdang types, trade unions, and the assorted people involved in “the movement for global justice”. (And while my Cantonese isn’t good enough to really tell, the non-CCP “Old Left” seems tiny and almost nonexistent, although there was a group loudly singing the Internationale.) From what I could tell, the most identifiably radical elements were those that sidelined the questions of suffrage and parliamentarism in favour of more immediate issues of exploitation and poverty, like the organised migrant domestic workers, with whom we marched for a time. You can do much worse than be associated with a throng of Indonesian and Filipina nannies chanting “Long Live International Solidarity!”.

And while I find the vortex of weirdness around Falun Gong and their repression almost impossible to interpret, my favourite banner was one advertising the cult’s “CCP Membership Withdrawal Service” hotline.

On second thought, perhaps there’s something meaningful that can be located precisely in the seeming arbitrariness of Falun Gong’s repression by the Chinese state, and the strangely rapid crystallisation of Falun Gong’s own propaganda machine, which, like the somewhat less successful LaRouchite aura of weirdness, has all the feel of a front-group. The situation reminds me of the strange, “content-free” maneouverings in spy novels, or the hovering vacuum at the heart of Don Delillo’s Libra, where Lee Harvey Oswald and the people around him (CIA agents, fascists, erstwhile Marxists, whoever) all seem to have been located at some kind of ambivalent, zombie-like “tipping point”, after which everything proceeds in an unlikely fashion and pace. Perhaps this arbitrariness also demonstrates an abstract relationship between dissent and the state that can be divorced from manifest “political content” — despite Falun Gong’s overtures to Western liberal democracy, they might just as easily be on the receiving end of an ATF firebomb in Waco as in a CCP labour camp or torture cell.

As for Lady Liberty, I’m (perhaps uncharacteristically) into her, as I found when I visited New York last year. But of course, my enthusiasm is always laced with an appreciation for tragic ironies — not in terms of the rather obvious abuse of the rhetoric of liberty to justify US foreign policy, or even radical critiques of democracy, liberal or otherwise, but in terms more immediate to the statue itself: we’d all do well to remember that as “Liberty Enlightening the World” was unveiled in 1886, women didn’t have the right to vote in either the US nor France, and were banned from the statue’s official dedication ceremony. Suffragettes circled the island on boats, heckling with megaphones.

[ tags: activism, democracy, dissent, hong-kong, protest ]

Hong Kong = sheltered workshop for white people.