To answer your question about activism, Nik:
Tony made a passing comment during question time about an incident he experienced back in 1970. It was just after an uncle of his had been killed in a high profile Aboriginal-death-in-police-custody case, and his hippie schoolteacher had taken him to a big Vietnam moratorium rally. He saw students on the front lines, taunting the cops to their faces about this death in custody case. “Who killed XXXX? YOU DID”, or thereabouts. He remembered staring, absolutely amazed that there was a category of people in the world that could do such a thing and still be standing. It was all very well for everyone at this conference to talk about being “real” enough in their aesthetic world to consider “activism” as something to be interfaced with, but Tony insisted that for most indigenous people, “activism” was a mode of speaking to power that they simply couldn’t access.
Interestingly, Lena later made an equally impassioned intervention that was seemingly the complete opposite of Tony’s. In contrast to Tony, people had been writing off “activism” as ineffectual or passe from a liberal-pomo capitulationist standpoint, and Lena, utterly exasperated by the disengaged rhetoric flying around the room, reminded everyone that for certain people in the world, activism was their only choice to survive in the world.
Of course, the question here is what “activism” actually means: organised radical activity, or the reactive institutionalisation of a certain kind of privileged, moral speaking subject. To tease this out, I think that both Tony and Lena’s takes are equally important.
strikes me as what both of those points are sideways concerned with is the question of what activism is.
It sounds like(from various things I’ve read on various blogs of what seem from here to be a circle/community (ie, you/Theorybitch/shane etc) that you’re all aware of/connected to specific activist circles/modes/communities.
I’d say that activism is/should be a more broad term. Someone whose very existence is troublesome/contested (eg Aboriginal folk, black/asian people, queers/transfolk) is an activist by managing to live a life that doesn’t conform to the limiting prescriptions laid out for them. By getting through the days. this doesn’t mean of course that they won’t also perhaps be able to engage in other forms of activism.
Someone who is relatively priviliged doesn’t have to/can’t do that kind of activism, but there are other sorts they’re able/better at doing…
it seems that one descrpiton bleeds into the other.. if all the various forms of organised resistance - from palestinian kids throwing rocks to student occupations to the flotilla2004 - are activism, then they all run the risk of falling into that institutionalised moral space. Once a space of resistance opens up, it is always tempting to defend it at any cost (to protect what little gains are made under oppression, and defend it against people who are also resisting, but who’s resistance threaterns the space) - unions are a fantastic example of this sort of well-institutionalised space me thinks. For one i have no problem with the positive productive role of morality (or ethics, or any combination of the two). I do follow what yr saying plums, but maybe i’d add that the key bit for me in the post was organised - having your existance as an affront to the status quo(s) is not enough, surviving is not enough either (well, actually both are already more than enough, but i mean something different). if activism is to be ‘necessary’ in the sense Lena means, it has to be (self) organised.. perhaps?