Author Archives: Nick Mirzoeff

About Nick Mirzoeff

Writer and critic

On Legitimation

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Throughout the course of the global social movement, there has been a serious question as to legitimacy and the place of violence. When Tahrir Square was filled with revolutionaries, it was clear that Mubarak was no longer legitimate. There has been an extensive, if not terribly productive, discussion in Occupy about “diversity of tactics.” Now the situation has become tragic and farcical at once with the absurd statement of so-called “Representative” Todd Akin concerning “legitimate rape.” Suddenly, Anglophone countries are immersed in discussions about rape.

Much of this centers around Julian Assange. George Galloway has made an idiot of himself as usual. However, Seamus Milne in the Guardian argues:

Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy’s diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?

That’s probably true. But so is this comment by Hadley Freeman in the same paper under the forceful headline “Rape is Rape is Rape”:

Assange is dodging rape accusations from two women. Not Wikileaks. Women. Same first letter. Different things. Also, while you can – contrary to other certain beliefs – become pregnant if you are raped, you cannot become pregnant from Wikileaks. Just to clarify.

When I posted on Assange a couple of days ago, I must admit that I was not fully aware of the details of the allegations against Julian Assange and seeing them discussed in Australian media as sexual harassment, I passed that on without checking, as some commenters pointed out. As the quotes above suggest, there was a gender divide on Assange that I fell into without thinking.

So the one “benefit” of Akin’s ridiculous remarks might be that we can have a broader discussion about violence and legitimation. There is obviously no justification or legitimacy in any act of sexualized violence. Equally, Akin did not “mis-speak” because the radical right believe in the legitimacy of their own violence. It is the counterpart of the violence that seeks to dictate reproductive choice, sexual orientation, marriage equality and so on. But also the violence that ends occupations, breaks strikes, and fires bullets. All are considered legitimate because that is the effect of the force of law.

One reason that I have said that the right to look is an exchange between two that precedes law is precisely this force of law. It has compeled slavery and legitimized violences of all kinds. In the modern era, such violence has often used secrets as a further justification. However, revealing secrets is no more of a justification for violence, if the allegations against Assange are accurate (and we should remember he has not yet been convicted). Nonetheless, we need to remain against heroes.

The tactic of consensus within the Occupy movement has been much questioned. It does have the virtue of finding another path to decision making than the 51-49 process that so dominates official politics. It has not prevented (or, to be fair, in any way caused) allegations of sexualized violence within the movement. It does not, however, claim legitimacy, sovereignty or authority and that is at least an important step in the right direction.

This is also a movement of bodies: placing bodies in space and claiming the right to be in our bodies as we choose. It shows how much there is to be done that a person’s right not to have their body used by another person is still the subject of international debate.

 

 

Undermining Neoliberalism

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It’s been one of the surprises of this project to see how often the subject of mining recurs. Miners have, of course, long been key figures in progressive and labor movements, but all that was supposed to be “old” capitalism. Today’s immaterial labor was not supposed to be affected by such issues. Only we’ve seen steel and coal strikes worldwide in the past year, from India to France, Spain and now South Africa. Given that the neoliberal solution to extracting primary resources has been to outsource them to developing nations, perhaps it is now caught in its own trap.

As you will know, striking miners at the Marikana mine owned by Lonmin in South Africa were fired on by police, leading to 44 deaths, 250 or more in hospital, and a further 259 under arrest. The issue here is that

rock drillers affiliated to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) demanded their monthly salary of R4 000 be increased to R12 500.

The rock drillers currently get paid a little over $300 a month for 12 hour days in which you are soaked by water from the drill heads. Other miners estimate that you can do this work for no longer than five years before your body gives out. By way of comparison, a US miner gets about $14.99 minimum for such work per hour, equivalent to $2500 a month, ranging up to $23 per hour, or about $3800 a month.

However, the South African National Union of Mineworkers, the official trade union, has not sanctioned the strike by the drillers. A new more radical union has arisen–the AMCU. The official union was at first even willing to endorse the company’s threat to the strikers that they must return to work by Tuesday morning or face dismissal. Now, following government intervention, dismissal has been taken off the table for the moment.

Julius Malema (left) at Marikana. Credit: Mail and Guardian.

What happens next? Given the militancy displayed in recent days, it’s hard to see how people just go back to work. At a meeting yesterday Julius Malema, a former ANC activist now expelled from the party, called for the mine to be nationalized and for a change of national president. Mourners wearing “Fuck Capitalism” T-shirts clearly agreed. A man using a pseudonym for fear of retaliation told South Africa’s Mail and Guardian:

It’s better to die than to work for that shit. People are coming back here tomorrow [Monday]. I am not going to stop striking.

Further confrontation is surely inevitable.

Once again, London-based capital is behind all this. The anonymous sounding Lonmin company is in fact the notorious Lonhro company, standing for “London and Rhodesian Mining,” under a new name. Once run by the appalling Tiny Rowland, even a Conservative British prime minister designated the racist and exploitative company “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism.”

The new company has done very well out of the post-apartheid state, as its own website acknowledges:

Our operations, consisting of eleven shafts and inclines, are situated in the Bushveld Complex in South Africa, a country which hosts nearly 80% of global PGM resources. We have been granted a New Order Mining Licence by the South African government for our core operations, which runs to 2037 and is renewable to 2067. We have resources of 175 million troy ounces of PGMs and 43 million ounces of reserves.

Platinum sells for about $1400 an ounce, so it’s not surprising that Lonmin made $148 million profit in the second half of 2011. Six men died underground during this period, named

Thamage Kgwatlha, Modisaotsile Edward Setlhare, Alfiado Maziwe, Hermanus Potgieter, Rafael Macamo and Alpheus Mokgano Moerane.

Mining remains what it has always been: dirty, dangerous, exploitative, destructive to the environment and highly profitable. Ironically, one of the most significant uses of platinum is in catalytic converters for vehicles, designed to reduce pollution and carbon emissions.

When the video footage of the shootings came out, all the comparisons were to apartheid-era policing. Certainly, like police forces from New York to Athens, overreaction appears to be the policy of choice here. What is being defended, however, is not the local racialized privilege that ruled in Southern Africa for centuries but the neo-liberal formula of low local wages for high global profit. Of course, the workers still tend to be people of color and those profiting tend to call themselves “white.”

The question now is whether the miners’ action sets off a wider discontent with the post-apartheid settlement, as Julius Malema is arguing it should. Too little benefit has accrued to the majority population in the past decade. A new elite cadre class is doing very well at the behest of traditional interests.

There’s just the chance that neo-liberalism has undermined itself. The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland resulted from one day of violence, as did the militant stage of the anti-apartheid struggle. It’s too soon to tell if the Marikana mine massacre will be the new Bloody Sunday or Sharpeville. But if not here, soon. And not before time.

Secrecy now, secrecy forever

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How long ago WikiLeaks seems. Yet for Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, the whole world is defined by the scandal. While the materials released were not of particular consequence, often merely confirming well-read suspicions, the culture of secrecy that they represented continues to assert itself. In this area, there is precious little distinction between the mainstream US political parties.

Manning has been confined in appalling circumstances, treated like a Nazi war criminal, rather than a person whose principles came into dramatic conflict with what he was being asked to do. As the military expanded its intelligence network as a key part of counterinsurgency, it was taken for granted that any person allowed to see what there is to see, and not told to move on, would do so gratefully. Never mind that, according to Manning, most spent their time downloading music and movies onto blank DVDs. He himself smuggled out his documents on DVDs labelled “Lady Gaga” so as not to arouse suspicion.

Assange has likewise been hounded in palpably absurd ways, whatever you think of him personally. Who else would Britain agree to extradite merely for questioning by prosecutors in what seems like a suspiciously convenient case? Of course, I am not condoning sexual harassment and, if this does prove to be a case encouraged by the authorities, it was a clever choice, knowing that progressive people would be torn between the two issues.

Here in Australia, Assange’s case is very much understood as one of civil liberties, both in the US and in Australia, where the Labor government has carefully followed the American line. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald:

We now have an American president who continues with indefinite detention outside the protection of the US constitution, who orders the killing of US citizens, who allows pre-trial punishment of Manning, and who continues to keep American officials immune from prosecution in the International Criminal Court for war crimes. With Assange, we now have a democratic government in the American hemisphere granting asylum to someone on the basis of well-grounded fear of political persecution in the United States.

A while ago, only my Occupy friends were posting material like that, now it’s mainstream opinion.

One more irony has yet gone unnoticed. The purported scandal of WikiLeaks in the first place was in part its flaunting of diplomatic protocol, as cables from diplomats were a major part of the leaked material. All kinds of huffing about the damage to diplomacy followed. Now the British government threatens to snatch Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy in London. I wonder how Anglophone diplomats in some of the world’s less secure locations feel about that? Not to mention that, as any reader of John Le Carré knows, half the so-called diplomats are spies anyway.

So it’s clear that what’s at stake here is not what happens to poor Bradley Manning or the career of Julian Assange. What matters to the Anglophone governments working in synch over this matter is preserving their right to act in secret, to continue to tell us not to concern ourselves with what they do, and to punish any effort to breach that divide. Here, finally, is something the political class can agree on: that they think they’re better than us.

Global vs. planetary

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The contrast between the global as instituted by neo-liberalism and the planetary, which is cumulatively under attack from its effects, is palpable in the Southern hemisphere. As the Australian public sphere continues in uproar on policy towards a few thousand refugees from the global, the slow indicators accumulate that there will be many times their number in the planetary change of geological era we have instigated.

One of the great unremarked ironies about the asylum seeker debate in Australia is that it is all intended to “send a message” to the would-be migrant. Now, I may not be the brightest person, but I do have a university degree and English is my first language and it still took me a week of reading to get a faint sense of what is intended.

The report presented to the government intends to encourage would-be refugees to go through the visa “process” in Malaysia, rather than taking to a boat and being processed in Australia. The new system will create Pacific outposts where a person will be detained for at least as long as the Malaysia system would take before being processed. Over $2 billion will be spent making the islands of Nauru and Manus capable of holding several thousand people. Clearly, then, the Malaysia system must be somewhat drawn out, or there would be no reason to hold people, When a person becomes a refugee, it is because they are afraid. Such a person may well not have the resources to fund a lengthy stay in Malaysia, let alone the language skills and so on.

The bulk of the seven thousand refugees heading for Australia this year have come from Afghanistan. Surely the reason for the increase is the growing crisis in the “country” as it breaks up into warlord-dominated regions in anticipation of the U. S. retreat in 2014. If the Karzai brothers are after you, it’s time to leave, whether the Anglophone governments of the world want you to do so or not.

One of the reasons that there is an extensive European settlement in Australia is the first globalization of whaling. Whalers shipped British convicts down here in substantial numbers. In 1791, a British whaler named Thomas Melville (ironically enough) wrote home that

We saw sperm whales in great plenty. We sailed through different shoals of them all around the horizon as far as I could see from the masthead.

It did not take long to exterminate this abundance. As early as the 1830s, whalers were selling up in Australia as the local species disappeared. There’s a slow recovery underway. Whale watching trips from Sydney usually see one or two whales on their voyages, which does not compare well to Melville’s first sight.

At least this damage was limited to what could be seen. In the current stages of the Anthropocene, the invisible structures of the ocean are changing. Today it was reported that the forests of giant kelp that support many species of life off south-eastern Australia have declined by as much as 95%. It’s a combination of effects caused by sea temperature rise, increased sedimentation and run-off from land use.

Above and beyond this specific change, scientists are using this as further evidence that the East Australian Current that runs down the east coast of the continent has strengthened because of climate change. The result is that ocean waters are warming and cold water species are moving further south to survive. There is of course a very finite limit to how far they can go.

Australia is admirably developing solar power and other renewable energy but even here it amounts to no more than 7% of total energy use and most of that total comes from a giant hydro-electric plant. Perhaps this is a naive suggestion from an outsider but I can’t help but feel that those billions spent to keep a few political refugees out might be better spent developing a far more extensive renewable energy system (for example), in order to mitigate the hundreds of millions likely to need to move if climate change develops in the way that it now appears that it it is going to do.

Wolf Hall and the Revision of Empire

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I resisted reading the phenomenally successful Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel for as long as I could. Stuck for something to read while traveling, I picked up a battered copy. LIke everyone else, I found it a surprisingly compelling read. At the same time, I could not help but notice the revision of imperial politics at work.

If you’re the other person who didn’t read it yet–even the little bookstore in Port Douglas, Queensland had her new one in the window–the book tells the story of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII. More exactly, after a brief prelude it describes six years of Cromwell’s rise to power, along with that of Anne Boleyn.

This is the Tudor-Stuart story that many middle-class people get taught at school. especially in Britain and its former colonies. That this period is so central to the teaching curriculum is in considerable part the legacy of James Anthony Froude, heir and biographer of Thomas Carlyle. Froude transformed Cariyle’s mystical theories of the Hero into a straightforward narrative of British heroes from history.

In his monumental 12-volume History of England, Froude dealt only with the Tudor period. His thesis is nonetheless simply stated: the privateers like Francis Drake and other adventurers of the period set Britain on the road to imperial glory. Froude constantly advocated for the formation of a global Anglophone sea-power empire that he called Oceana. Arguably, American power in the 20th century from the Great White Fleet to Midway and the Cold War was exactly that.

Mantel takes this thesis, whether consciously or not, and applies it to Cromwell. Like Carlyle, she proclaims

It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries.
The voice is ambiguous throughout, so it could be said that this is Cromwell “speaking” but it is also the voice of the indirect narrator.

Cromwell is presented as a modern man, who learns multiple skills as a mercenary fighting in Italy for the French. In other words, he is depicted as exactly the kind of hero Froude had in mind, only updated for the era of financialization. Cromwell’s talents are presented as bureaucratic organizing, especially filing, and the ability to render accounts. He regulates the money supply, like any good neo-liberal should. Mantel modifies the blustering great man thesis accordingly. History is shaped rather by the detail and the person behind the scenes. Describing Cromwell cooking up a deal with an ambassador she writes:

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals the processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes.
So whereas for Froude and Carlyle, the double of the Great Man was the historian, for Mantel it is of course the novelist. creating a reality effect by the convincing detail.

And everyone says how realistic it all seems and that’s true because Mantel has in effect written a screenplay. She has the conventional dramatic opening scene that forms the youthful character, in this case a brutal beating of Thomas by his blacksmith father. We then jump cut to 27 years later, when Cromwell is already a successful administrator to the then all-powerful Cardinal Wolsey. The book is carried forward by dialog, rendered almost entirely in modern style with the occasional “in no wise” to remind us that this is the sixteenth century.

Much of the assertion is frankly hard to credit. Would an early sixteenth century father have thought that he should treat his children kindly because his own parents were mean to him? Or has a classic baby boom self-justification not been projected back five hundred years? Would Cromwell and Henry VIII have worried so much about the opinion of women, much as we might think they should and might like to imagine them doing so?

There is a strong literary revisionism at work in the book. Thomas More is made to say “Words, words, just words” so often that even the slowest reader will be reminded of Shakespeare. Other lighter references to Eliot and Joyce can be found. But the heaviest conflict is, oddly, with Robert Bolt’s old play and film A Man For All Seasons. The Catholic More is presented by Bolt as a civil rights hero, defending freedom of conscience against a tyrannical government. Mantel depicts More as a brutal inquisitor, willing to torture and burn all heretics that come his way. The imperial state is the good guy in this movie.

To create her central conflict, Mantel writes Cromwell as a convinced Protestant reformer, perhaps the one principle he is not willing to bend. Again, she follows the line of Carlyle and Froude in insisting that English empire was properly Protestant from the first. She defends the literate virtues of this Protestantism against the vanities of Popery and the excessive radicalism of Anabaptism alike. Where modern radicals have seen the Anabaptists of Münster as a precedent, Mantel sees only foolishness and male sexual desire. Catholics are simply deluded in their attachment to transubstantiation, relics and icons. The execution of More is nonetheless the denouement, Cromwell’s necessary evil.

You can’t help but read Wolf Hall to the end once you’ve started–at least. if you come from the cultural background that it takes for granted. For all its capacity to tell a good tale, Mantel’s exaltation of the financial bureaucrat, the imperial servant and nationalism in general but Englishness in particular are all to be rejected. Don’t go and see the inevitable movie with Anne Hathaway as Anne Boleyn, Michael Gambon as Henry VIII etc and I already hate the fact that it will win 15 Oscars.

Another World: for slow politics

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Today a symposium at Artspace, Sydney, called Another World drew together art practice and activism. The talk ranged from Sydney to Germany, New York and elsewhere. There was a notable retreat, I’m glad to say, from such terms as “global art” towards questions of politics, debt, ecology and situatedness. We learned about time, to take our time, that this is our time and it is, of course, past time.

Zanny Begg, poster for Lucern

An artists panel in the morning featured an interesting contrast of global and local. Zanny Begg talked about her video with Oliver Ressler What Would It Take to Win? (2008)–the link leads to the entire piece. It covered the global justice movement protests in Heiligendamm (June 2007). What was interesting from the current perspective was to see the force of making no demands: wanting “wins” undermined the global justice movement. Whereas Occupy has been able to reclaim space and, crucially, time.

In that long time that it takes us to get anything done, an aesthetic relation is created between the people doing the action, whatever it may be. A project like the Rolling Jubilee, to buy and abolish debt in the name of OWS, might be an art work. Indeed, the curator Tom Polo mentioned a work in his show There’s a Hole in the Sky, now on in Campbelltown called “Commerce.” The artist purchased items from local bankrupt people, using his art budget, is currently displaying them and will give them away at the end of the show. There’s something very evocative about that action, in a part of Western Sydney that is known for high levels of bankruptcy.

In his afternoon talk, art historian Terry Smith contrasted different approaches to evoking the planetary. He called on Jorge Macchi’s work Blue Planet currently being used as the emblem for the Sydney Biennale as exemplary such refiguration. Macchi creates a “figure of the planetary” (Spivak) by emphasizing the oceans over the continents.

Macchi, “Blue Planet”

Elsewhere in in the Biennale, Smith found little to like with the exception of several projects, such as Jananne Al-Ali’s video project Shadow Sites II (2010) [see below],

a film that takes the form of an aerial journey. It is made up of images of a landscape bearing traces of natural and manmade activity as well as ancient and contemporary structures.

By comparison, Smith suggested that Documenta 13 in Kassel stresses the multiple temporalities of the contemporary. One claim caught my attention: that being on stage (I would say in public) actually creates time. The exhibition includes historical artifacts on this theme, like Charlotte Salomon’s Life? Or Theatre?,  her immensely powerful treatment of National Socialism.

Salomon, “Life? Or Theater?”

I do worry a bit about this, about always using National Socialism as “history” but the exhibition is in Germany and does feature work describing Kassel during the Third Reich.

The center of the show, according to Smith, is an installation called The Brain, centering on works impacted directly by war:

objects like two wonderful Giuseppe Penone stones, small Bactrian princess figures (2500 b. C.), six Giorgio Morandi still lifes, damaged objects from the National Museum of Beirut, a towel stolen in 1945 from the apartment of Adolf Hitler or masks made from iPad wrappings by Judith Hopf.

They even had a token Occupy space, a segment of the Documenta grounds turned over to a small encampment.

Together with the Berlin Biennale use of Occupy as a sideshow, this represents a clear, if not terribly important, attempt to co-opt the “cachet” of Occupy to render an art exhibition “political.” An occupation that is limited in time and space is just a zoo.

What did I take away? Moving past the politics of the “win” to a politics of transformation is a slow politics. It moves paradoxically quickly but it consumes time, takes time away from labor and leisure time alike. More pertinently, it tries to abolish that distinction. For the artist or the writer, there is no greater pleasure than “working.” A slow politics would allow that privilege to all.

All Roads Lead to Wall Street

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What is this? It’s the new poster for the day of action on the OWS anniversary, September 17, 2012. It’s a call for a convergence on Wall Street, still the epicenter of the financial, political and environmental crisis, where still no one has gone to jail. They gave up even trying to bring charges against Goldman Sachs, the vampire squid, the bank so evil it gave capitalists pause. No charges. It’s a restatement of the fundamental reasons that the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” made so many people reply “Hell, yeah.”

It’s more than that. It’s the emergence of three clear priorities within the Occupy movement. They represent our impossible demands. OWS demands an end to corruption in politics. Of course, that would mean overturning the jaw-dropping Supreme Court fix known as Citizens United; it would mean abolishing the endlessly corrupt interface between corporations and legislators; it would mean regulating advertising and reinventing government by the people. So in the present system, to even make this demand is impossible.

We demand debt abolition. Debt is the engine of financial capitalism from the payday loan, the high interest store card and the pawn shop that prey on the low- or unwaged, via the exploding disaster of mortgages and student loans, to the debt vultures who generate spectacular profit on debt. It is unthinkable to abolish debt in the present system, just as it was once unthinkable to abolish slavery. At the same time, it is increasingly clear that the current rate of exploitation cannot be sustained.

Nowhere is that more self-evident than in the crisis of life, the environmental crisis. When you watch little kids play on the beach on a cloudy day in broad-brimmed hats, as in now standard practice in Australia to protect from the UV radiation, you know this has gone too far already. Our bodies feel out of sorts with the weather and strange new patterns. Crops dies in the fields for want of rain in one part of the world, while floods devastate elsewhere.

For thirty or more years, the forces we call “Wall Street” have devastated the social, cultural and biological worlds with their theory of rational actors. In short, all actions are economic at heart and are calculated by each person for their maximum economic benefit. It is this theory of the rational that Occupy challenges as being patently false. It is irrational to sell politics to the most corrupt. It is irrational to have debt collectors pursuing one in seven Americans. It is suicidally irrational to treat the biological resources available to us as infinite.

“Free yourself” means you have the freedom to think for yourself and to do otherwise. S17 is just a day. If you can’t be there or want to start now or want to do something different, that’s all great. These are just some of the threads that comprise the movement. Free your mind, the rest will follow.

On Growth, Sugar and the Forest

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Another day, another World Heritage Area. Today we headed through the Queensland sugar plantations to the rainforests of the Kuku Yalanji people. The experience was a direct clash between destructive but highly productive Western agriculture and indigenous no-growth stewardship of the land. For two centuries, this has been a history of the former defeating the latter. The Yalanji have been here for 40,000 years, though, so this little story is just a blip. What we saw was the contradiction between “globalization” and the planetary.

It was during the American Civil War that Queensland jumped into the business of sugar cane production to meet the fall in supply. Sugar cane was an immensely labor-intensive process and so indigenous labor from across the Pacific was brought in under compulsion.

Sugar planting in Queensland around 1870

Missionaries had no hesitation in calling it slavery (above). As a self-governing colony (until 1901), Queensland nonetheless had a free hand. The compeled labor was brought in from relatively close locations like ni-Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands and as far away as Polynesia. They were called “blackbirds,” and are still trying to get their story recognized.

In more recent times, the industry declined until the rise in demand for ethanol led to a massive revival. Although the cane growing is now highly mechanized, the square plantations of seven foot high plants, each as thick as a large finger, would be recognizable to any plantation owner or worker.

As ever, the grass (sugar cane is a grass) is visibly destructive. The crop rapidly denudes the soil because the indigenous tropical flora, although spectacular, are evolved to grow in the poor, sandy soil. Later we were shown a tree in the forest from whose seeds the Yalanji make bread. It’s eight hundred years old and only about twelve feet high. Sugar cane seedlings that I saw were therefore surrounded by black compost and white chemical powders. In between the fields, which are in all stages of production from planting to recently harvested, stand a few remnants of the forest.

Higher up, where the cane can’t grow, the rainforest and its people survive, protected now as a National Park and a UNESCO heritage site. Today the steep green slopes were shrouded in mist and cloud, looking more like Aotearoa New Zealand than the Sunshine State. The Kuku Yalanji people have recently begun to offer guided tours of their land and its culture.

Guides from the Kuku Yalanji people

Our walk, guided by Jenny, also known as Butterfly, was beautiful and informative. Apparently uninteresting plants were revealed to be means of cleaning, healing, or sources of food. Shelters were left for others to use, rather than being demolished. Few now live in this traditional way, but there’s a commitment to remembering and passing on the old ways. It’s easy to be naive and romanticize this way of life. But as Raymond (Kija/Moon) emphasized at the end of our tour, these people have survived in this place for millennia without rendering it unusable, as Europeans have managed in a couple of centuries.

Raymond performed the digeridoo for us, and showed the required technique of circular breathing, also used by some jazz players like Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Wynton Marsalis. Accompanying himself with clapsticks, he gave a virtuoso performance, imitating the sounds of numerous animals above the drone-like beat. He also insisted that the instrument was forbidden to women, although there are many known instances to the contrary. It seems to be another instance where a reaction against European culture is producing a more conservative form of indigenous culture. For example, art works that were formerly permitted by Elders to be seen in galleries have recently been reclassified as secret.

It’s hard to be censorious. The cassowary bird is a key link in the rainforest ecosystem.

Cassowary bird

It eats fruits that are poisonous to humans and disseminates the seeds in its scat. Humans have now taken to feeding the flightless bird. The cassowary becomes accustomed to being fed and sometimes attacks people for food. Human food has altered its digestive system, so we were told, with the result that it is less able to digest the fruits it normally eats. It’s at these small intersections that things go out of joint and violence results.

If it’s a direct choice between sugar culture and indigenous conservation, it’s seems clear where we should go. But it isn’t. The Kuku Yalanji are not proposing that kind of return to a lost beginning, in part because the land could no longer support the numbers of people that there are here, and in part because electricity, health care and other such modern conveniences are not worth revoking. There are some people living traditionally off the coast of the island of Kauai, part of the Hawai’ian archipelago, it should be said, and traditional navigation is making a return across the Pacific. By the same token, we can’t choose modern-style growth as a solution because there aren’t enough resources for everyone to live in the Anglo-US-Australian way. This is the sharpest edge between the myth of “globalization” and the actual experience of the planetary. All the choices are bad.

Dare to Know?

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I’m in Port Douglas, Australia. Like just about everyone else who visits here, I went today to see the Great Barrier Reef. It’s not unusual for people to finish sentences like that with the quip “while it’s still there.” Indeed, the Australian government has said that chances for coral reefs are very poor. Two hundred years ago, Westerners had no idea the Reef was even there. Now we’re exploring Mars, which is astonishing, but destroying our own habitat, which is worse. Have we dared to know too much?

Old Enlightenment hands will recognize Kant’s challenge in What is Enlightenment?:

sapere aude/dare to know

Who should do such daring? Kant was, among other accomplishments, the first to teach a course on anthropology, although he never traveled. In his various writings on the subject, he established what I take to be a fundamental distinction of Enlightenment between the modern North and the “islands of the South,” which were not only not modern, they could  not be modern by definition. For Kant, the South was impossible, out of time, and out of place.

When his contemporary Captain Cook was here at about the same time, he sailed right into the Barrier Reef. Despite his permanent accolade as the “greatest seaman of all time,” his navigation had no concept of such obstacles. The Endeavour had to be repaired and it took over three months. Let’s note that such bricolage would be far beyond any present-day vessel but also realize how much support Cook must have had from the indigenous population to survive, even if that support was compeled, or limited to not killing them. Now the Reef is widely known, a “trip of a lifetime” destination. Judging by the array of facilities here, many people take that trip.

Without lapsing into Romantic sublime, the Reef really is amazing. If you’ve seen Northern hemisphere corals in Florida or the Caribbean, the first thing you learn is how utterly devastated they are by comparison. I’m aware there’s no science in this statement but what I’ve seen is the best local people think they can find to sell to tourists. Although you do see Crown of Thorns starfish, which were the great threat to the Reef before global warming, what remains is nonetheless dazzling. It’s not just the color and the patterns but the interactive adaptation. A fish saw me coming and descended into an anemone, which then wrapped its stinging tentacles around it. It’s that kind of balance that carbon emissions have knocked permanently out of homeostasis by increasing water temperature and acidity. Everyone knows this. No person in a position to do anything asks how they would dare to explain to their grandchildren that, yes, there were such ecosystems but we stood by and let them die.

If you’ve seen bleached coral, it looks not unlike Mars.

Curiosity descending to Mars (artist impression)

Curiosity is the Endeavour of our time: sent for science but with hopes of gain, conquest and colonization not far behind. The sad thing is that, if we want a lifeless desert to explore, we’re making lots of them all over our own planet. What would it take for us to dare to know that? How can we learn, finally, that the South is fully and integrally part of Enlightenment, the modern, knowledge, or whatever you feel inclined to call it?

Imagine No Borders

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Very early this morning Australia time, I saw John Lennon singing “imagine no possessions” as part of the Olympic closing ceremony. Kim Gavin has used the often blander-than-bland Olympic ceremonial to restate a case for Britishness as a form of collective and international experience. It’s a revisualizing of the national imagination (hence “Imagine”) that was surprisingly effective, recapturing some of the energy of the Make Poverty History and Jubilee 2000 campaigns. What’s next? How about this: “imagine no borders.”

For this positive version of the national was then undermined during the course of the day by a dispiriting debate in the Australian media about immigration and asylum seekers. It seems that the 4500 asylum seekers a year who reached Australia last year has gone up to 7500 this year. Actually, they make their way to a piece of land that is “Australia,” not usually the mainland but a remote island, or get picked up by Australian navy vessels at sea. When I was last here in 2001, the country was convulsed with a debate following the decision of then-Prime Minister John Howard to turn asylum seekers away. A vessel named the SS Tampa was the flashpoint, with Howard falsely claiming that asylum seekers had thrown their children in the sea to compel a rescue by the Norwegian vessel.

Since then, Australian government has taken a series of repressive measures against immigration, forcing asylum seekers to be “processed” offshore for a period in locations like Nauru, an island threatened by sea-level rise, devastated by mining and desperate for revenue. Today the Labor government accepted a report proposing that asylum seekers again be processed on Nauru or Manus Island. The opposition are against this, not for humanitarian reasons, but because they want the boats to be turned back altogether. They all agree that having a family member in Australia should no longer be grounds for asylum. Only the Greens are willing to denounce the whole affair.

Here is one of those aspects of the nation-state that elude me. I don’t get why America can’t do anything about guns, why Britain is obsessed with the monarchy and so on. By this token, why is a continent-sized country with a population of only 18 million so exercised about this small number of migrants, people so desperate that they are willing to sail the Pacific in small, leaky boats? Is it so impossible to imagine living together?

The glib answer would talk about long histories of Australian racism, and perhaps there’s something to that, but it doesn’t fit in so well with the current effort to visualize Australia not as part of the Northern Anglophone sphere so much as a key hub in the Asia-Pacific region. On the street and in the media, it’s a notably more diverse self-image than it was a decade ago.

Perhaps it’s all just too hard to imagine–or better, to make coherent from a single point of view. I remember standing on a beach in Rarotonga, part of the Cook Islands. At that low level, there’s an optical illusion in which the sea appears to be higher than the land and it gave me a kind of vertigo. It wasn’t that you felt that the sea would in fact drown you, but that it was overwhelmingly obvious what a minute data point one person is in relation to a space the size of the Pacific Ocean. I’ve had that sensation quite frequently during Occupy, when the sheer bulk of capitalism appears dizzying. It’s as if you are at risk of disappearing into the vanishing point of the perspective created by the nation-state.

I was reminded of the experience by an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about Tuvalu (pronounced Two-VAH-loo). This tiny atoll nation is only two metres above sea level on average and the reporter Matt Seigel experienced the strange effect of seeing the sea as “above.” Tuvalu has strenuously campaigned to make the threat to its existence from sea-level rise part of the international agenda, with limited results. Some islands have already been evacuated and the government wants to secure a destination for its population of 10,500. No one seems willing to admit them, although there seems to be an assumption that in the end New Zealand will do so.

Tuvalu is not a paradise (above, the garbage dump on Funafuti). There’s issues with water, garbage, fish supplies and so on. One thing is clear from interviews with local people. None of them want to leave. Instead of doing something to make it more likely that they can stay, government policies have been directed towards preventing them from leaving a flooded land.

But why is it so hard to imagine no borders? Money has no borders, it moves freely wherever people choose to send it. Yet the longer “globalization” has gone on, the harder it has become for people to go where they want. Border checks are longer, more capricious, and more overtly hostile than ever. There is, it seems, a certain comfort to be had from the smack of authoritarianism. You are not in charge, but at least someone appears to be. Can we imagine the vertigo of embracing the vanishing point, in which there are no borders, only people, and the not terribly complicated things that they want and need?