public terror
by jebni on December 14, 2005
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 ]
11 comments
Quite. more and more, michael warner’s Publics and Counterpublics makes sense to me.
by jean on 14 December 2005 at 11:17 am. #
Also:
In reference to comments on your earlier post; there is of course a quite complex set of relations between race/whiteness-nation-beach-body-gender vectors at issue here. Sounds obvious, maybe, but ‘race’ is much more readily available to ‘public’ discourse and so it ends up being the organising dynamic. And, duh, of course that is what is at the heart of the matter from the point of view of the participants. But the reactions from the mainstream media and from those who rail against the mainstream media also makes it impossible, without being screamed at, to mount a critique of the mediation of these events that might want to propose a countering focus on masculinity, say.
by jean on 14 December 2005 at 11:33 am. #
Really? Outside of blatantly racist opinionating from obviously right wing people, “race” had a high point in more general public discourse on this issue when the Cronulla incident — and various “Arab responses” to it — were described as “race riots”. But that in itself is a term that has always been deployed reductively to suggest a flattened kind of inter-tribal antagonism in order to dodge issues of power, sedimentation or institutionality, or worse, to connote the presence of “other races” as a problem in itself. But besides this, and helpfully following the prompting from John Howard and Kim Beazley, I actually think that “race” is rapidly disappearing from the “reasoned public agenda”, and that plenty of “progressive-minded” white people are desperate to recast the issue for various reasons — mainly for the purposes of disengagement and disavowal.
Plenty of people I’ve spoken to are saying “it’s boys being boys — you’re overreacting [to the 5000 people (including young families) chanting 'no more Lebs!', and the young white women pounding Arab women's foreheads into the ground]…” Or then we have the conversation where yes, the crowd was acting in an incredibly racist way, but the “root causes” (more on this later) were “not racial” (whatever that means), but simply a boyo turf war. It’s not just white people who want to bury the issue, of course, but also Lebanese people and others who want to be able to sleep at night by rhetorically displacing the whole affair. I’m not accusing you of a similar move, but I simply don’t agree that “masculinity” hasn’t been raised as an “alternative focus”.
Of course, it depends on whether we think masculinity has been raised adequately, rather than just as a label. I have no doubt at all that a rigorous focus on masculinity will yield some very important ways of thinking about how various territorial entitlements and group violence have been enacted, inflected, circulated and “escalated” (in particular ways). To suggest otherwise would be idiotic. But why a “countering focus”? Surely we have enough lenses to go around. And surely an essential companion to such a focus would be a less identity-specific focus on patriarchy rather than just “masculinity” — on what Tanya has described below as the gendered hierarchy in which patriarchally inflected/organised publics (i.e. not cultures of masculinity) have “a sense of ownership and entitlement to white women’s bodies”. I think this is the gender issue that has been consistently dodged, from the “Lebanese gang rapist” moral panic to the current fracas, and it would be amiss not to note that this kind of generalised patriarchal panic played a vital role in the general structure of lynchings in the American South — the iconic case in point if we’re going to be talking about violently racist panics.
On a final note, I feel obliged here to offer a disclaimer, and state that any focus on “race” and racism worth its salt shouldn’t actually abide by the logic of racial identities being enacted by various interested parties in this struggle — i.e. attributing essential causalities to easily bounded “races” instead of power. Which is why “racialisation” has become such an important term around these issues. And while I’m on the subject of causality, there are many quixotic debates about the “underlying root causes” of this shit, with people waving models of reflective intentionality or false consciousness around, which all have investments in certain dodgy models of subjectivity.
People don’t work that way, so let’s talk instead about the architectures of desire — the sedimented or fast-moving structures of the social landscape — that allow 5000 people to channel various collective, affective flows in ways that lead to this kind of shit happening. Somehow I don’t think this will displace “race” as an inescabable and central factor (duh) in our approach to these “disturbances”. And by the way: the strongest, most overriding case against displacing the role of “race” in this lies completely outside the reifiable world of the “psychology” of “participants”, and can be found instead in the exercise offered by some guy in the Sydney Morning Herald a couple of days ago: if it was 5000 Lebanese people chanting “Kill the Aussies” and beating up a pitifully outnumbered bunch of random white people, the army would have been called in, and a state of emergency immediately declared. This inescapable subjunctive “fact”, and the more concrete fact that such thoughts aren’t continually racing through the heads of us all (rendering us unable to sleep) should not only be a source of incredible shame, but more importantly constitute a towering testament to the deep, structural racism that exists in this country.
by jebni on 14 December 2005 at 1:40 pm. #
I take your point about the use of the word “counter” in my comment – it doesn’t belong there. let’s replace that with your second paragraph. And I am especially interested in the way that claiming and defending the rights to women’s bodies – include the rights of women themselves, you will notice, figures in the struggle for power – and yes, patriarchy is one way of looking at that. But those power struggles spill over beyond the boundaries of the frame for the debate, way over. And to repeat myself as well as you, of course the whole thing is racialised above all else. i still say we can’t talk about racialisation, or actually existing violence, without that stuff. so when someone says “it’s just boys being boys”, then yes, let’s engage just as rigorously with that as we do with the “unaustralian” nonsense.
So that’s what I was getting at, somewhat sleepily, i now realise, by the simple idea that we keep the complex relations between (constructions of) race and whiteness, sex, gender and masculinity, and power in the frame.
With my educational background, I could never see race as an actually existing category that is separable from those other things.And of course I don’t want to sweep anything under the carpet. It doesn’t mean I know what the hell to say about it sometimes.
On another note:
It may be the wrong time or place to muse on tangentially related topics, and the following bit is not to be interpreted as an intervention into the discussion of this particular event, but it’s just something i’m thinking about in relation to publics and counterpublics.
The eruption around the event’s coverage does remind me of the dominant construction of the (private, individual, domestic, feminised) ‘everyday’ as being (pleasantly or unpleasantly) mundane, in contrast to ‘public’ and ‘spectacular’ events – I just meant that, for example, singular explosions of racialised, violent conflict around themes of nationalism are better candidates for ‘publicness’ than, say, the habitual, repetitive terror of domestic abuse.
by Jean on 14 December 2005 at 2:21 pm. #
Oh no, that disclaimer about essentialism and race was a qualifier about my use of the word “race”, just in case anyone was misinterpreting my focus on it. Because funnily, when that person said the violence was “not racial”, I technically agreed :)
And dealing with the public spectacularisation of the event is important too. I’m just grappling with how to do this, given that the significance of the event shouldn’t be underestimated.
by jebni on 14 December 2005 at 2:24 pm. #
yeah, i know…I’m saying that i agree with your disclaimer, aren’t I? i thought i was…now i’m confused.
let’s see if we agree:
i don’t want to displace race; rather, i want to talk about the racialisation of the participants, but with full awareness of the complexity of the racialising move, and also (I missed commenting on this bit) I agree that one thing that needs to be countered is the idea that racial ‘difference’ is causal
by jean on 14 December 2005 at 2:33 pm. #
Yeah, I thought that you thought tha.. never mind. ;)
by jebni on 14 December 2005 at 3:12 pm. #
The ‘public’ is generally that which is perceived to be a legitimate and defensible portion of our view of the world. That, of course, does not make this view either legitimate or defensible.
Our flawed idea of the ‘public’ – as promoted by the ideas of Capitalism and Nationalism – is that which, unfortunately, has given rise to many a social evil including Transnational Militancy, aka ‘terrorism’.
by Inquisitor on 15 December 2005 at 12:11 am. #
Few quick things. What happened on cronulla wasn’t mainstream Australia’s view – so when you say the country makes you sick, you should actually be saying those idoiots at cronulla make you sick.
The reason Sunday happened was because of a few idiots were paying out on people on the beach, and then the whole idea that lebs do it came up, where it was probably on a few groups. And if you can’t see that, then look at how you see Australians at the moment when only a small group of people did Cronulla.
The sooner people realise this the better man, and you’re more than welcome on the beach if ya don’t cause shit.
by someone who's sick of the built up crap on 15 December 2005 at 7:18 am. #
The sooner people realise this the better man, and you’re more than welcome on the beach if ya don’t cause shit.
Calling Dr Hage! Dr Hage, come in! We have a patient for you, Dr Hage!
by az on 15 December 2005 at 12:13 pm. #
yes, indeedy. Thank you, middle Australia. I know I’m always terribly grateful to be tolerated in public places. I’d be even more grateful if I looked or acted as different as a leb.
[Dr. Hage et al must be tired, btw. I would be. Because it's not enough to know that you were right, over and over again, is it?]
by jean on 15 December 2005 at 12:40 pm. #