a dialogue between Ben and Claire (2002)
We were encamped in an isolated location, like a bunch of contestants in a reality TV show, and in some way those parameters forced us to make contact with our material context. For those of us outside the concentration camp, there was no escaping the fact that a bunch of people were locked up behind razor wire, very close. We had come to make contact and to contribute to the creation of freedom. Disengagement was not an option. Nobody could be a bystander.
This dialogue was born in various debriefing, late-night phone conversations between us that occurred after the Easter Woomera 2002 protests. We wanted to capture our thoughts on paper about the significance of the protests and what we thought could be taken from them. We came to the Woomera protests from very different starting points. Claire had been involved in the “refugee campaign” for the past year with groups like the Refugee Action Collective and No One Is Illegal and had visited Woomera twice before. Ben felt like he’d just been “rentacrowd” at rallies. We felt, along with everyone else, that Woomera was very significant both personally and politically, but why? We also felt, like many* *people, that the Woomera protests should not be overly fetishised, but what would this mean exactly? This is by no means an attempt at a definitive piece. There are big black holes because maybe some of this stuff cannot be theorised outside of particular contexts. We wanted to throw out some ideas, ask some questions and perhaps begin a dialogue.
no sequels: s11 + m1 + o3 + woomera 2002 does not equal …
[claire] What I didn’t want to see was the kind of politics that has abounded since the 11th – 13th September 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum. The climate of attempted “recreation” proliferates amongst a Left which surprises itself with its success and then is left floundering, unsure where to go next. But every attempted sequel has been a failure, or at least not as successful of the original that it tries to rehash. These events are fetished to the extent that all we see is an endless horizon of letter/number combinations — s11, o3, M1 — that increasingly lack meaning.
Part of the problem has become the fetishisation of a tactic – the blockade – or in the case of Woomera 2002, the tearing down of the fences at a detention centre. Suddenly the politics of the protest becomes subsumed to the tactic. Blockade becomes larger and larger on the propaganda and the politics drops off. For the September 11 - 13 anti-WEF protests the rallying cry “Stand Up for Global Justice” dominated the poster, encapsulating, in a very limited way, what the protests were going to be about. For May Day 2001, the words ‘shut down’ and ‘blockade’ suddenly became more important that trying to transmit the politics of the event in any way. Given that the May Day 2001 blockade at the Melbourne Stock Exchange were about one tenth of the size of s11, it seems that this kind of sequel event had no meaning for those outside the radical milieu. It also indicates to me that there is no nostalgia for a recreation of events outside certain left-wing elements.
Moreover I believe that the lack of turn out for the May Day 2001 protests was in part because it was widely known that the blockade of the Stock Exchange wasn’t actually going to work in any real way. It was widespread knowledge that the Stock Exchange operates mainly through computer systems and that accessing the Stock Exchange building is not essential for the operations of the Stock Exchange. To then expect people to turn out to take part in something that is a foregone conclusion seems ludicrous. A similar thing occurred this year at the insipid May Day protest when Melbourne people were asked to come and blockade the DIMIA offices, a questionable target in the first place, even more so once the building was closed for the day. That this happened so soon after the Woomera protests, where the spirit of direct action and civil disobedience was so inspiring, was incredibly disheartening.
The lessons that can be learnt from the Woomera protests then I believe are not ones about giving a protest a particular tag that seems to have worked previously and expecting people to turn up simply on that basis. What worked about s11 and Woomera 2002 is not what they were called or the fact that particular tactics were used, but the politics on which they were built. In some ways it I believe it is because they were in some ways quite non-specific about the “reasons” people should attend, rather there were general statements or rallying calls put out – stand up for global justice, make the connections, make the journey – that people could relate to without having to subscribe to a certain political line. Then there was the fact that these events were about taking action – shutting down the World Economic Forum, with our bodies against the camps – rather than idly waving placards and linking arms outside of an empty building.
[ben] I think there are two kinds of problems that can occur in attempts to build a kind of brand-name momentum for mass mobilisation. First, there is the tendency to posit the event as a content-free thing in itself, which nobody would ever admit to doing, but which happens nonetheless. It’s particularly dangerous when one endlessly repeats call-to-action mantras that try to blanketly transmit political messages outside of any social context, so I think this is linked to another problem that cuts a little deeper: how we conceive of the transmission of politics itself. I think most attempts to simultaneously be accessible and yet still make political links between situations are unfortunately self-defeating – there’s a reduction to a really thin kind of rhetoric that makes sense to nobody. Which is what made Woomera 2002 so interesting, because I think that it briefly circumvented some of these problems of politics and communication.
finding a common enemy
[claire] Woomera was interesting in terms of the lack of social democratic demands made. This was a refreshing and appreciated aspect of the protest for me. I think the making of demands of the state is a politically corrupt tactic, in that many of those responsible for formulating these demands are of the opinion that the state will not be able to meet them anyway. But they rationalise that by making these demands, campaigning around them and failing to achieve them will lead those involved in the campaign to “see the truth” about the role of the state under capitalism and become revolutionaries. More often than not in my opinion, constant loss, rather than turning people into revolutionaries, turns them into cynical, disenchanted political actors who chose to give up activism rather than to constantly fail. So to attend a protest that was organised with no overarching political program and no social democratic demands was refreshing and real. In fact such demands would have appeared ludicrous and rightly so. What was wanted was the closure of the detention centres and there appeared to be a realisation amongst the camp that the only way this was going to be achieved was if protesters did it themselves. It was quite clear from over a year of campaigning for the closure of the camps demands on the Federal Government or the Immigration Minister to act were ridiculous. As an article on the freespeech.org website states: “Too much of the time anti-globalisation amounts to an appeal to the state to take account of the wishes of some of its citizens and return to the good old days of social democracy and national autonomy and sovereignty so that it can protect us against the worst excesses of the corporations … We should understand that states and government are complicit in the process and act accordingly” (freespech.org). The same goes for the “refugee” campaign. We should understand that the government and the state is responsible for the ethnic caging of asylum seekers and act accordingly.
The protests’ refusal to engage with the state by making demands is reminiscent of the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program that was established in 1969. The Panthers did make demands of the state, however the defining feature of the Breakfast for Children was that it demonstrated the Panthers’ true emphasis on social reality rather than rhetoric. They were programmatic Lenninsts who did the right thing. Cleaver says of the programs: “Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organises them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organised into their poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty. This is liberation in practice … If we can understand Breakfast for Children, can we not understand Lunch for Children, and Dinner for Children and Medical Care for Children? And if we can understand that, why can’t we understand not only a People’s Park, but People’s Housing, and People’s Transportation, and People’s Industry and People’s Banks? And why can’t we understand a People’s Government”.
Therefore, in terms of the Woomera protests, if most of those attending can understand the uselessness of making demands of the state to close the detention centres, can they not understand the uselessness of any demands of the state or in fact a state at all? This kind of thinking is one that is more and more prevalent under 21st century capitalism. The kind of lead-them-down-the-garden-path thinking that has been so prevalent in progressive movements throughout the 20th century is long outdated and deserves a re-think. In some ways the kinds of thought linkages that are expected of people previously are not such huge jumps any more. Capitalism is becoming nastier and nastier and in that nastiness more blatant and obvious. Perhaps it is not that people are disinterested in politics and but rather the methods of progressive organising that are on offer are distasteful because of some of the assumptions they make about people’s ability to draw their own conclusions about the current state of the world.
So if you believe then in protesters ability to draw their own conclusions and to have their own reasons for attending protests, how then do we relate to each other? Certainly not by getting on a megaphone to remind everyone of why we are here. In 1995 Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army said: “We … ask in the name of all men and women … that you save a moment, a few days, a few hours, enough minutes to find the common enemy”. We have identified a common enemy, let’s get on with naming that enemy and acting against it.
[ben] I think that Woomera 2002 was a really powerful demonstration that there are meaningful alternatives to an impotent politics of “protest”. Over the last few months, especially since the antiwar movement started, I’ve realised that putting a reified image of “protest” at the centre of political action absolves one from the work of making mutually challenging connections amongst people in communities of resistance, and of actually creating the collective actions that will materially challenge the current system. It leaves one open to making empty demands of the State which actually help to obscure the actual politics of our current situation, which is the punitive tightening of national borders to contain people’s attempts to counterglobalise capital.
One possible exception to this dire “state of demands” is if one cannily approaches this kind of stuff in terms of “blackmailing the State” – “do this or we’ll make your life unlivable”. But by definition, this is only tenable in a wider context of action: telling the British government to drop the Poll Tax, in combination with a “can’t pay, won’t pay” strategy of refusal; telling the Italian government to stop the rises in basic services in the 1970s, in combination with a similar strategy of mass refusal of payment, in an attempt to financially bankrupt the State. Sabotage, for the politics of the concrete. Meanwhile, a politics of “protest” leaves one free to “extract”, in one unsympathetic Woomera 2002 participant’s brazenly instrumentalist language, “the most political mileage” out of any given situation, in terms of increasingly meaningless symbols. And all this while the fabric of people’s lives hung in the balance. Is it no wonder that many people in the world think that “politics” is dirty word? More on this later.
But regardless, when it was working well, Woomera 2002 remained for me a different kind of “demonstration”, and it really helped to challenge my ideas of what “politics” were all about. As in, “we can intervene like this; let me demonstrate”. Thus, it was a practical, performative action that showed us something about the world, and in a small way, it changed something about that world. This is never an easy or natural thing; I think it has to be monstrous, in a good way. Socialist feminist critic Donna Haraway has noted that the figure of the monster always stands at the border of whatever we consider the natural human condition, and that the word “monster” shares the same root as the word “demonstrate”. So how can we have more monstrous and challenging demonstrations, more collective convergences of desire that don’t submit themselves to disengaged and idealist rhetoric?
This will inevitably come across as “sectarian”, but I don’t think the logic of political identification is that important (hey, I still don’t know what the fuck “autonomist” means) – what’s important is if people’s actions have a qualitative orientation towards creating situations that can bring about radical change. People act differently from what they say, which is why we have to help create those situations where crap ideology (ours and others’) commits suicide. What happened at Woomera was really interesting in this regard – perhaps primarily because
the event was built on really particular material circumstances (and yes, this is a good thing, and not a reason to disqualify the possibility of waves of future actions drawing inspiration from such a unique event), and
the gestures made by the visiting protestors were connecting in a very real way with people’s everyday life of resistance within the camps.
So, what does all this usefully tell us about the relationship of radical action to materiality and everyday life? Hmmmm…
I also think it’s crucial that this practical evaporation of ideology – which happened in spite of whatever dodgy rhetoric was indeed floating around at Woomera – wasn’t just a nice sandpit for the protestors outside. Rather, it happened across and through the fences as well: there are people in the Woomera detention centre who (defying attempts to fetishise them as either revolutionary symbols or objects of pity) no doubt nominally come from “authoritarian sects”, but we managed to make a modest but radical kind of mutual action. Cool.
Survivor : The Australian Outback : Outwit, Outplay, Outlast
[claire] What was amazing for me about Woomera was the do it (y)ourself. ethos that pervaded all aspects of camp life. There were many affinity groups that had organised previous to the camp and that were really well set up – the legal team, the health and medical service, desert indymedia – but also people were really into doing things for ourselves. One incidence that really illustrates that for me was when I saw these young women cleaning out the toilets. I hadn’t seen them before and I didn’t see them again, it’s not like they were “organisers” of the event, they saw a problem and got down to fixing it. They were refilling the porta-loos that had stopped functioning because of lack of water. Instead of looking around for someone else to deal with the problem, they just undertook to do it themselves which encapsulated the whole feeling of the camp for me.
The camp had a feeling to it which was unlike any other protest I have ever attended. There was a basic infrastructure established that people had been working on for months that was set up to facilitate people’s ability to take action and simply that. The idea that you can create a situation that facilitates action but doesn’t dictate what form that action takes is not one that seems to have much currency amongst the Left in Australia but in this case it certainly worked. The most successful spokescouncil was one which operated in a similar way. Previous to facilitating it I went to a couple of previous facilitators and a few other people and asked them how they thought it should be run. The suggestion that they came up with to run it as a timetabling exercise seemed to me to work the best of all the spokescouncils. In this statement there is also a recognition that by the Sunday morning a lot of the pressures that had been on previous spokescouncils had dissipated, allowing a more relaxed and cooperative atmosphere amongst the participants. But to run the spokescouncil along similar lines as the protest had been organised worked excellently. There was no attempt to achieve consensus or unanimity amongst the participants, rather spokes were asked to propose actions that were then written up on a piece of paper so that all at camp could see what was happening and when and participate if they wanted to. This style of organising has many problematic aspects, too many to go into now, but in this particular situation and case it worked amazingly well and was an empowering experience for me to be a part of.
[ben] There seems to be a mythology of spokescouncils being considered a perfect decision-making space. For some there’s a pretense (whether “for” or “against” spokescouncils) that they mean “anything goes”, allowing participants to be absolved from any collective responsibility. Following the idea that it should be a perfect decision making space, others assume that it should act as a yet another boring forum for atomised individuals to vote on binding decisions, and get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.
But instead, the spokescouncils at Woomera were more like campfire sessions from a reality TV show. They were a space to air contentious issues. To invite and communicate decisions, but not necessarily to make them as a totality. And like reality TV, it was contentious stuff, but luckily, in contrast, it’s stuff that now can’t be really aired in public – it remains almost unrepresentable, lost to that instant. And in the final reality TV irony, the material circumstances (i.e. being effectively stuck in the middle of the South Australian desert) meant that we couldn’t just “leave the island” when we didn’t get our way and spat the dummy. No retreats to the relative safety of anywhere.
with our bodies against the camps
The most effective way to stop machinery is to throw a wrench into it. Most of us can’t afford wrenches, so we have to use our bodies instead.
– Howard Zinn
[claire] What also impressed me about the protests was how ready people were for direct action. Nothing I have ever been to before had ever been like that – not even the Jabiluka blockade where there was a strong emphasis on direct action. I missed the Friday night “fence event” but took part in the trespass actions on the Saturday and Sunday. I was amazed how prepared people were to cross that mythical line into illegal action without any fear. It was like the situation was so severe that people no longer could sit on the sidelines. The normal fear of repression, police response or arrest didn’t see to exist for the protest campers. It was like the old cliche of being faced with other people’s oppression making you stand up and be counted had come true in an inspiring and courageous manner. Andrew Kopkind, an American activist, writes of his involvement with the radical Weathermen grouping’s actions at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: “… simply not to fear fighting is a kind of winning”. The same I believe can be said of Woomera, simply not to fear state repression for the multitude of reasons people had was a sort of victory, and one which should be celebrated.
The mind is more apt to perceive many things adequately, the more its body has in common with other bodies.
– Spinoza, Ethics
[ben] I think that true engagement, in which your practice is always in life-changing dialogue with your material conditions, is hard to do. Nobody really “knows” how. To do it properly, you have to give up a little of that idealist will-to-control that usually comes with political programmes, that comes with the painfully artificial separation between “politics” and “everyday life”.
While on a recent community music exchange in London, Koori hip hop artist MC Wire was rapping about racism. He was challenged by some who questioned his need to rhyme about “politics”. “There’s no word for ‘politics’ in my language,” he replied. “This is my reality “. Everyday life is where everything goes on. He may have been making just that point, but perhaps also for Wire, “politics” has largely abandoned this grounding. We have to overcome our predictable readings of people’s contempt for “politics” as being a rejection of the possibility of social change. We’re all familiar with the use of the word “politics” to mean Machievellian power games (“office politics”), or participation in State officialdom (“a career in politics”). But we’re less able to see how our programmes-of-worship, our empty and flattened slogans, are just as removed from reality as these more familiar bastardisations. Yes, we need plans and techniques beyond the immediate. But everyday life is the fire in which we forge them, from those little moments, and not the reverse.
Where do we go from here?
Why is the Left usually so unable to create situations that engage deeply with the world? Why does it always come off like a bunch of evangelical cults? This isn’t the centrist’s automatic equation of radical politics with “dogmatism”. Rather, it’s an observation that politics seems to be all about convincing people of various ideological Truths, converting them to your cause, wrapping the world in ideas from above, rather than generate of useful concepts in interventions. And no, “politicising people through involving them in actions”, contrary to its potentials, usually means getting people to act on panicky autopilot in accordance with “our” wishes. No more angry zombies!
Why are most people in the world able to write and design really cool personal party invitations, full of clever and engaging calls to action, as if by instinct? They always seem to look much better than you’d expect. There’s a set of social skills mobilised in the making party invitations that I think are vital to the question of acting and organising politically. If used at all in the traditional Left, these skills are usually instrumentalised as mere tools within a grand plan, and hence reified. How can we act with these skills, rather than manipulating them? How can we deploy them without crushing them with our weighty intentions, our dry authority? How can we allow revolutionary new relationships and actions arrive?
At an anti-borders forum held in Sydney a few months later, a comrade made the ambivalent observation that “Woomera happened by accident”. I think that this is really interesting, because it puts the spotlight on what I think was really important about Woomera 2002. What’s actually going on in the spaces that the programmatic sides of our brains describes as an “accident”? The wonderful kind of limited engagement that happened at Woomera was like a deus ex machina plot twist that happened at the beginning (rather than at the end) of the play that was our mutual action. God out of the machine. It seemed to just arrive. Hundreds of people, ready to do what it took to challenge the fences (and what they stood for), on both sides — whether it was breaking the law or to providing a network of support. A general and uncanny resolve. I’m not trying to mystify this by suggesting that it was inexplicable. And leave behind the religious connotations of the word “God” for a second, and focus on the concept. Out of the machine.
In the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a machine is an assemblage of forces that produces desire. We need machines of struggle — or as Deleuze and Guattari call them, war machines — that can produce the revolutionary deus ex machina situations. These machines need a consistent social surface on which they can assemble themselves; Deleuze and Guattari call this (in post-psychoanalytic terms) the body without organs. How can we be a body without organs? A body without organs has a “plane of consistency” — it isn’t “consistent” in a homogenous sense, but consistent in a way involving disparate elements that have a common intensity holding them together. That’s what we have to do. Be disparate and together, and intense. How was Woomera like this?
Deleuze and Guattari note that you can build a body without organs with a programme — one that has a sensitivity to the moment. A chief example of theirs is S&M: a body opening itself up to a different kind of consensual training that steps beyond cliches of pleasure and pain, or of (the authority of) “strength” and (the weakness of) “submission”. Revolutionaries need to train in ways that go beyond cliches of everyday life and politics, strength and submission, in ways that open them up in unexpected ways, not all of them “morally pleasant”. How was Woomera like this?
I think that at brief moments at Woomera 2002, our bodies came together with a consistent intensity to form bodies without organs and machines of struggle. At those points, dead ideology ceased to matter. Concepts always matter, but the illusion that we were going to first convince people of ideas first, which would then leading to homogenous action, was broken. The distinction between these things became untenable, and whatever predictable rhetoric about “us” “locking up Ruddock” and “freeing the refugees” evaporated as we enacted concepts together. Concepts like freedom. Concepts that were uncoded by liberal, or social democratic, or socialist, or whatever ideology.
Most of “us”, whether we’re in the camps or outside them, don’t agree about much ideologically. It’s important for those of us outside the fences to stop fetishising those inside as somehow being the incarnation of certain ideological fantasies, especially since many of us who were there inside the detention centre have belonged to an assortment of radical organisations that, like any other, have serious disagreements with others. What matters is that we’re actually trying – possibly against our “better judgement” — to effectively act together against capital’s border control mechanisms. From that common action we can work with, contest and develop concrete concepts that may just render many of our disengaged, ideological fantasies irrelevant, like the useless slogans at Woomera.
Of course, the best way to do this is being contested all the time, and we have to create examples and grounds for the most effective kind of a common action. Talking about deus ex machina and assemblages of bodies doesn’t mean being a hippie and waiting for shit to arrive from the heavens. It involves programmatic thought, but a different kind of programmatic thought. It involves work, but a different kind of work. And much of this work has to do with the invitation. Woomera 2002 was a particularly good party invitation. It was an engaging call to action. Did it have demands? No. Did it attempt to represent? Not really. Did it set a basis for how to come together? Yes.
[claire] The whole idea of a separation existing between politics and everyday life brings to mind an argument that was had recently at a dialogue on borders organised by No One Is Illegal. One of the participants criticised no border politics as not being connected with people’s reality or “where people are at”. This raised the question for me of who is being referred to when it is declared that this is outside people’s reality? As MC Wire said – this isn’t politics, this is my everyday life. Same goes for those interned inside Australia’s concentration camps, those living in border camps on the Thai/Burma border, undocumented migrant workers and those living in Palestine where, as Alex Kouttab says, the border literally shoots at you.
I was always really bad at designing party invitations. One of the houses I’ve lived in was in Bent St – so we always had party invitations that entreated people to get bent at Bent St, ha ha. So I’ve always left that expression of creativity to other people. However I am an avid consumer and intensely attracted to a political praxis that is creative, engaging and interesting. In recent times I have loved the mergence of big puppets, get into costumes and radical cheerleader at several protests, Woomera included. Music has also been used effectively on and off during my protesting years. To dance and sing and act crazy at a rally always fills me with joy and lends to the event a spirit of revolution that I do not find at more traditional rallies where I am speechified at then led passively through the streets whilst being berated to join with the bland sloganeering emitting from the megaphones. Rallies are mostly boring, painful, disempowering events that I hate attending and yet occasionally feel compelled to as my duty. What kind of politics is this? To dredge up the old Emma Goldman quote: if I can’t dance, it ain’t my revolution. However cliched that may sound it acts as a powerful reminder that the project of radical social change needs to employ creativity and joy.
Again the recent forum on borders – one of the other critiques also raised by aforementioned participant was the idea that in a borderless world we will all look the same, eat McDonalds and be overwhelmed by a homogenous Americanised culture. One of the strongest arguments I heard against this was the notion of human creativity. The question this raises is how do we trust in this notion of human creativity and cultural resistance in envisioning a post-capitalist society and yet are so bad at actually employing or mobilising it in our struggles. This is not at all to dispute whether this creativity exists – I believe very strongly that it does – but rather to point out that much of the politics that is in existence is not only disengaging, but also bland and intensely boring. I have just finished reading ‘Radical Melbourne’ and one of the things that struck me about the left groups in existence pre-1945 was how they had their shit together in terms of the social aspect of their organising – they knew how to have fun. Despite the immense political differences I have with these, often Stalinist, organizations it all sounded very appealing – the picnics, the summer camps, the footy games. When did the tradition of such organising leave Australian radical culture? There seems to have been a re-emergence in recent years, and I’m sure it never left certain movements, but it’s certainly not a widespread phenomena. When will we learn that to march people around the CBD to buildings that are protected by a line of blue is the antithesis to engaging politics? When will we take up concepts like empowerment and actually employ them in our protest strategies?
decoding and recoding the camp
[ben] What was deflated at Woomera? Instrumentalism: the objectification and use of movement in the world for a fundamentalist and teleological Grand Plan. As an alternative to this, what happened at Woomera was a regrounding of “politics” as a series of collective, ethical interventions into the present, with those in the middle of those struggles, creating spaces where new kinds of social relations can suggest themselves. A different “way forward”.
Of course, it’s possible to give all of this an ideological gloss, and there have been plenty of reinterpretations of the event – mostly as an underwriting of liberal humanist politics: that in the face of such an experience, what we could most clearly apprehend was “our common humanity with the refugees”. While the sincere orientation of these kinds of declarations towards an attempt at solidarity cannot be doubted, there is no doubt in my mind that it is useless to appeal to or extend the kind of logical demarcations (of commonality and difference) that can underwrite nationalist exclusion in the first place.
Yes, there are things in common on both sides of the fence, but when the fence comes down the differences do not suddenly dissolve. Yes, against all the propaganda of the war on terror, the people in the camps really are men, women and children who are suffering from appalling punishment. Yes, the State’s attempts at “dehumanisation”, at erasing their desire, pain and anger, must be undone. But towards what? Surely we must escape the whole setup of homogenising logic. Surely solidarity means making contact with and standing together with people who are different? And whose differences are not reducible? Crying together, coming together in resistance is all about friction, exchange and mutation rather than a comfortable homecoming. Isn’t this what a revelatory moment of understanding is all about? Yes, compassion must be an answer to all of this, but we must be sensitive to its different flavours in our current context, some of which may be highly recuperative.
Of course, all of this must be situated in a context. It’s very different for someone subjected to the most appalling abuse to claim that they’re not an animal, that they’re human. To suggest this, as many asylum seekers do, is not a comfortable homecoming for them. But is it for local activists? Is it not a covert reinscription of our own nationalism to simply extend that border of “humanity”, just as it is to speak with Statist authority that “refugees are welcome here” rather than question the position of that authority in the whole setup? Doesn’t the fundamental aspect of that logic need to come tumbling down? The frictions that occurred over issues of indigenous power at Woomera 2002 (and their attempted absorption via a practice of “respectful listening” that papered over real differences) only re-emphasises the fact that any feel-good investment in a “common humanity” is a lazy way of processing the decomposition of “Politics” that was actually occurring.
[claire] What was also deflated for me was the positioning of the protesters as “good white nationalists” at the centre of the imagined community of the white Australian nation. Not only was there a refusal to posit ourselves to speak with Statist authority on who is welcome but the notions of the nation-state were critiqued and attacked. The language utilised by some local activists in asserting that “refugees are welcome” here falls into the nationalist practices critiqued by Ghassan Hage in his book “White Nation” where he states:
“Like the ‘evil nationalist’ engaging in exclusion by categorizing the other as undesirable, the ‘good, tolerant nationalist’ engages in inclusion by categorizing the other, if not as ‘desirable’, at least as ‘not that undesirable … If racist violence is better understood as a nationalist practice of exclusion, ‘tolerance’, in much the same way, can be understood as a nationalist practice of inclusion. Both, however, are practices confirming an image of the White Australian as a manager of national space.”
I would argue that, in similar ways, the declaration that “refugees are welcome here” only serves to reinforce the idea of the Australian nation with local activists vying for control over the right to determine who crosses our borders – the State establishes criteria for who will be allowed to immigrate, activists assert that those categories should be extended. Bad form.
However, at the Woomera protests the chant “no borders, no nations, no deportations” was a chant regularly and refreshingly heard. To take up such adages as well as contending that we are all barbarians * goes some way in questioning the logic of a *politics based on nationalism. We need to move beyond the nationalist practices of speaking for the nation intrinsic to the claim of who is welcome and in the “othering” inherent in the arbitrary classification of those seeking asylum as refugees. We need to make it our project to reach what ben refers to earlier as a coming together in resistance which may be uncomfortable, difficult and fractious but will be ultimately real.
[ben] Warning: don’t take my critique as an advertisement for an adrenaline-pumping kind of negation that regards liberalism as “wussy”. Because that’s not why political liberalism is bad. Along with many of us (especially the prisoners) who were at Woomera 2002, I cried during our contact at the fences. People on both sides of the fence were confronted with that which was almost indescribable. We were crying together. What we must do is feel and act our pain and sympathy in a manner that doesn’t create narratives of sentimentality, of sainthood and martyrdom, or which reinforce our ability to patronise or condescend.
We need radical sympathy. An acting together. Here I want to draw on some of the other, non-sentimental meanings of “sympathy”, some of which may be dodgy and New Age, but which I think are of conceptual use. First there is “sympathy pain”, which you can experience if you’re attuned to someone else’s bodily state. Then there’s “sympathetic magic”, which you might experience, if you believe such things, when someone pushes pins into a voodoo doll that represents your body. But most of all, there’s the physical phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration”, which is what happens when you put two tuning forks close together – they both start humming, and louder, because each reinforces the other. So rather than a sentimental sympathy that reinforces liberal individualist statehood, I think what happened across the fences at Woomera was that people were vibrating in sympathy. Acting together. Resonating.
What does this mean for the hard work of building solidarity on a planetary scale? Given the global scale of Empire now, and the neocolonial realities that are always before us in every pore of society, I guess all questions of race and class, while not able to be universalised, have a global significance that we can be attuned to, wherever we are. The fact that our global market depends on enslaved workers of colour who are often punished like dogs when they try to escape their lot, or exterminated like cockroaches when they fight back, and the fact that this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because they’re not white, is perhaps one of the most important thing facing the planet today, and it can be felt everywhere.
I fully believe that engaging with the differences generated under globalisation also means tuning into those ripples of planetary significance. I’m tempted to say that the significance of the racist exploitation boiling underneath the “global market” can be “generalised”, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. Rather, we can tune into a significance which is neither particular nor general – the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “whatever”, which he figures as the key to the impossible project of “community”. That is where we must go.
Thus, we need to experiment with models of political affiliation that enable us to act together, engaged in the reality of our current circumstances. We need a practical and faithless process that sidesteps the increasingly meaningless idealism and programmatic posturings required of traditional political organising.
And so it’s about a real movement. Not an ideological one. It’s about working together to destabilise border control. “Refugees” and “citizens” alike. It’s a real resistance to the enclosures of globalising capital. As always, we always have to ask ourselves, what is the concrete political reality of the current situation? What are people actually doing to resist? The movement is to escape the enclosures. People are doing it. This is the politics we must grasp.
[claire] The idea of resonance for me encapsulates two important points – of thinking about how capitalism affects you and of solidarity. For me it is part of an instinctive reaction against the self-interest type of politics which says we must show hot you will benefit from the liberation of others because I hate the way this discounts the beautiful human ability to resonate, to emphasise, to radically sympathise. I don’t think people were crying at the fences/border because they were intellectualizing that they had nothing to gain from the detention of those inside. I will never give up a politics which creates the space, or at least attempts to, for people to cry, get angry, outraged and upset, because this politics is real. It engages not only with our everyday lives but our humanity and our collectivity.
I went to Woomera because it felt like the right thing to do. Once I had decided to go I was questioned by someone who was (and is) intensely critical of the protests because he believed we would find ourselves in a situation where the detainees would escape with our assistance and where we would be unprepared for this, therefore how could I be complicit in this. In the end the only answer I could come up with was that it felt like the right thing to do at the time. This kind of instinctive desire to do something when you find yourself in a situation which is almost too horrible to contemplate – living in a country where people who come to us for help are locked up in cages – is not something that should be rationalised away. Sure I have a desire to educate myself further in political theory but I have absolutely no desire to lose the passionate side of my political nature which is necessary for me to resonate, intensely.
