“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).
“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
“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?
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.