not the motorcycle diaries

“I have just expressed myself in a hopelessly abstract manner. I understand that I have just given definitions that are very hard to understand. I only have one way to excuse myself, to justify having recourse to such muddled and apparently unwarranted constructions. I can only try to use this indefensible tool as a key. If a door that had always remained shut opens - no matter how unwieldy the method used - the one who turns the key will appear human again.”

- Georges Bataille
‘Attraction and Repusion I’

in Denis Hollier’s (1979) The College of Sociology 1937-9:107

Image: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002).

I’ve recently been assailed by the conviction that my PhD research is boring as batshit, dull as dishwater and other such alliterative metaphors; and that this fact makes me intrinsically both un-interesting and un-sexy. In this dispiritedness, I have spent the past two days filing 18 months worth of paper in the hope that some kind of visual organisation will provide some inspiration (this was preceded by a visit to Officeworks for possibly the first time in my life. Why the first time? Because up until recently I have either had a job I could nick stationery from, or I have lived in the same city as Martini and she has nicked stuff from her job for me, or Melissa has furnished me with stuff her Dad nicked from work in the mid 90’s. Buying one’s own stationery is a foreign concept to me and therefore my trip to Officeworks was quite the adventure. I mean, have you seen the number of shapes and colours that Post-It notes come in? But I digress).

The top of my chest of drawers now supports a number of handsome, mottled-black, old-school ‘lever arch’ folders that sport the following headings:

- MST/Brazil: field notes, corro, media clips, MST and Via Campesina info

- MST: academic articles by Navarro, Wolford, Harnecker, Stedile and NACLA

- Social movement theory, new social movements, recognition and redistribution

- General social theory, misc theory

- Reflexivity: aesthetic, emotional, and social movements, Lash.

- Postcolonialism, whiteness

- Woomera and Baxter convergences, individual campaigns, activist discourse, Australian social movements.

- Globalisation (general), World Social Forum, People’s Global Action, Third World and the global justice movement (GJM)

- Autonomy, Italian Autonomia, anarchism and post-anarchism

- Academic scholarship on the GJM

- Feminist theory, gender theory, feminism and gender in the global justice movement

- Friendship (Derrida), Foucault’s political ethics, affect and emotions, methodologies (ethnography, field work, narrative and discourse), art and the image in activism.

With the possible exception of the last folder, I am still not convinced that my project is at all interesting.

Sigh.

“People should listen to us when we say, again and again: we determine the order at our border! And we ensure that it is maintained, for good reasons. Whoever wants to traverse … needs permission. Otherwise, stay away from our border! He who puts himself in danger will die.

I know, ladies and gentlemen, it sounds hard. And will perhaps even be interpreted by some of you as ‘inhumane’. But what is ‘humane’ and what is ‘inhumane’?

Humane it is, to make peace for all men on earth … And if, as history teaches us, wars are made by man … then peace, too, is a work of man. Whoever seeks to weaken or damage the German Democratic Republic, whether consciously or unconsciously, weakens or damages the prospects of peace in Germany. It is humane to have created and built this state! It is humane to strengthen and protect it! It is humane to guard the GDR against those people who would most like to eat it for breakfast …”

Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, GDR propagandist

The Black Channel: 1965

Cited in Stasiland 2002:125

More manna from the academic heavens (named as such because it is perfect fuel for my thesis, which of course is the only definition of manna from the academic heavens worth mentioning): The Global Resistance Reader, edited by Louise Amoore. I am 15 pages in and already wondering what’s not to love. The introduction alone talks about ‘drawing the parameters and justifying the exclusions’ of global resistance, asking ‘is it possible to unambiguously identify and distinguish between emancipatory or positive resistances on the one hand, and discriminatory or negative resistances on the other?’ (basically the topic for the chapter I am currently writing). She calls into question ‘the assumed boundaries between academics, activists and citizens’, placing emphasis on ‘competing approaches and interpretations of global resistance’ and noting that ‘competing accounts of global resistance tend to have their differences located in specific understandings of what power means, how it is exercised, and what is the nature of politics and political life’. Not to mention the statement that ‘there is always difficulty in identifying and claiming a ‘we’ in global resistance politics. Who is speaking and on whose behalf do they claim to speak?’, and ‘why do we recognise some resistance more readily than others?’.

I’ll just add one more out-take, from page 7:

“‘politics’ becomes synonymous with the instrumental actions of sovereign individuals or states, and thus becomes narrowly delimited and far removed from the messy and contingent practices ofo everyday life”. Ahhh.

In other news I got a bit excited yesterday and submitted an article for publication, and then realised it was basically an abridged version of another one, including some wordforword-ing. It is OK to plagiarise if you’re plagiarising yourself? Come to think of it, I can’t believe these are actions I am taking and questions I am even considering. Academia sucks. After this I’m going to be a truck driver.

In other other news, I don’t care what Speigel Online says, surely ANYTHING is better than Berlusconi.

“I liked the sticklebrick nature of it, building long supple words by putting short ones together. Things could be brought into being that had no name in English - Weltanschauung, Schadenfreude, sippenhaft, Sonderweg, Scheissfreundlichkeit, Vergangenheitsbewultigung.

(…)

I think about the feeling I’ve developed for the German Democratic Republic. This feeling needs a sticklebrick word: I can only describe it as horror-romance. The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name. ..”

Anna Funder, Stasiland. 2002:4.

A lovely fellow sociology postgrad made the point yesterday that Coalition Government policy is often made using a ‘rhetoric first, policy later’ strategy. That is, the Government create hype around a certain issue, invent and embed the language required to buttress the hype, and then implement a policy to deal with it. The population is so convinced by the hype that once the policy comes through people accept it without a murmur. She was talking about the shift away from public health funding through emphasising the magical goodness of private health funds and offering families a temporary rebate. But she might as well have been talking about immigration policy. Today I just happened to need statistics on how many people are in Australian immigration detention centres, and which countries they come from. This is the link to the information:

http://www.immi.gov.au/illegals/

This is another link that visitors to the above site are encouraged to follow:

http://www.immi.gov.au/illegals/dob-in-line.htm

Illegals?!

DOB IN LINE?!

Has the Immigration Department always been an outpost of The Daily Telegraph?

Frasco, my apologies. First, I blow you off in favour of my ‘real’ friends in Radelaide, and then I totally ignore your suggestion to google ‘failure’.

Last night I saw this done on The Big Screen (the googling of ‘failure’ followed by ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’), and oh heavens, how I laughed. Google might accept censorship of ‘democracy’ and ‘Falun Gong’ in China, but at least they are not raving Bushophiles.

In memory of many an entertaining mIRC chat when we were but pipsqueak nerdlets - Frasco, this one’s for you.

8.30am Picked up the phone, rang Martini. Talked about sao biscuits and how funny they are.

10.30am Went back to sleep.

12.30pm Had a shower.

12.45pm Walked up the road to get a take away soy flat white.

1.00pm Made toast with peanut butter (picked ants out of peanut butter jar whilst waiting for toast to pop). Ate it (the toast, not the ants).

1.20pm Logged onto the internet. Read my e-mails, except the ones in Portuguese, which are obviously too much effort for such an early hour. Read Ms Fits’ blog. Read Ms Cynic’s blog. Giggled. Said “ah thank goodness for brilliant women”.

2.15pm Might do some work. Might not.