not the motorcycle diaries

“…the requirements are of academic intelligibility, in the service of which we write for publication. I must first show how the frame and the point of genesis are themsevles contested, and then remind myself that within the frame, and after the genesis, is a patchwork of which I have not yet learned to speak (for ethnography/sociology must be unlearned here) without the legitimation-by-reversal of mere admiration.”

– Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited’, in Outside in the Teaching Machine, 1993, p. 142.

“…may I not forget to question: what is it to assume that one already knows the meaning of the words; something is taught by me and learned by others…

…the most urgent political claims in decolonized space are tacitly recognised as coded within the legacy of imperialism: nationhood, constitutionality, citizenship, democracy, socialism … “Feminism”, the named movement, is also part of this so-called heritage of the European Enlightenment, although within the enclosure of the heritage it is often inscribed in a contestatory role.” (144)

“To fix it in paint is to efface as much to disclose.” (145)

“…the cultural politics of asking Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas to listen only to purely “traditional” Algerian things comes quite often from the most Frenchified…in decolonization, she has to negotiate actively with the trace of the French until it becomes unrecognizable as such and useful …” (157).

“The task of a feminist political philosophy is neither to establish the proper meaning of “true”, not to get caught up in a regressive pattern to show how the proper meaning always eludes our grasp, nor yet to “ignore” it … but to accept the risk of catechresis.”

“…how can I be certain? And what is to know, or be sure that a knowing has been learned? To theorize the political, to politicize the theoretical, are such vast assymetrical undertakings; the hardest lesson is the impossible intimacy of the ethical.” (171).

*/Ana adjusts beret*

*pulls out cigar*

1. Scene from First Tuesday Book Club:

2. Scene from Caché:

This morning I was finding it a little hard to get over Brendan Nelson’s exhortation of how the Australian Army is “shining a light into the dark corners of the world” (a motto of the British Empire replete with images of nondescript Africans soaping themselves under the Coat of Arms).

Then I read this. So now we know what that luxury resort on Christmas Island was being built for.

“A federal magistrate in Albuquerque took under advisement Thursday a government motion to exclude evidence related to the war in Iraq at next month’s civil disobedience trial of eight anti-war protesters.

The eight, cited by Homeland Security officials in September for ‘failing to conform with signs and directions’ during a protest at the downtown Santa Fe federal building, had promised to put the war on trial” in Magistrate Don J. Svet’s courtroom.

A group that included a student, several retired people and a Jesuit priest tried to have an unscheduled meeting with the staff of U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., saying they wanted the senator’s signature on a document calling on Congress to end funding for the war and withdraw U.S. troops.

After being denied a meeting for the whole group, they walked into an elevator, sat down and began reading aloud the names of American soldiers and Iraqi citizens killed in the fighting. Officers then removed and cited the protesters, who later declined to pay a fine.

The action was one of 375 organized Declaration of Peace events around the country last September.

The government asked the judge to prohibit the defendants from directly mentioning such things as the justification, legality, cost, conduct, consequences and impact of the war in Iraq.

At Thursday’s hearing, the judge said he would rule during the proceedings on what testimony he would allow, and the group, who refer to themselves as the Elevator 8, agreed they wouldn’t drag out the testimony.

The defendants “have strong feelings and want those feelings known,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Pflugrath said.

“That’s well within their right,” he said.

Clearly, he added, the defendants are permitted to explain in court why they were at the federal building, but “questioning the constitutionality of the president’s action under the War Powers Act is a gray area.”

Although the judge has set aside a full day for the trial, Pflugrath said the charge is “fairly minor,” and the government plans to call as witnesses only the security officer at the building, the federal protection service agent who issued the citations and possibly Domenici’s office manager.

Defendant Bud Ryan, co-coordinator of the Roman Catholic peace group Pax Christi New Mexico, said the defendants plan to present testimony from character witnesses and might even try to subpoena Domenici.

According to Ryan, “It’s pretty clear that it’s his office policy that anybody who doesn’t agree with him gets the short shrift on everything.”

The trial was first scheduled for January, and Ryan said he hoped it would not be postponed again. “If we lose and I go to jail, I want to get it (the sentence) over with. I’m one of the main people promoting Hiroshima Day” in Los Alamos in August, Ryan said.

Only six of the original defendants were in court Thursday. The Rev. John Dear, a longtime peace activist, and one other person were traveling. Jordan McKitrrick, 15, who was also cited, was dropped from the case because of his age.

The trial is scheduled for April 12 at the federal courthouse at 421 Gold Ave. SW in Albuquerque.”

– From The New Mexican, March 22, 2007, at the Declaration of Peace website.

I went to see the Best-Foreign-Film-winning Das Leben der Anderen/The Lives of Others on Sunday night, and it prompted some fast and furious obfuscating from me (whilst Johnny Guitarri tried to steer me unnoticed past the moist-eyed ladies in linen suits). It left me convinced that, when films deal with matters in modern western historical memory (colonisation, the Holocaust, the Stasi), they only succeed when they establish a bearable distance between The Present (the audience) and The Past (the foreign, finished thing that the audience spectates upon). This was particularly striking for a subject matter that is so recent - these Others who had their Lives monitored are my parents and grandparent’s age.

I’ve been contrasting it, in my mind, with Michael Hanecke’s Caché. The past is in the present, in Caché, and the question of complicity in the recent horrific past is raised and left open. The French colonial past is not over for Algerian orphan Majid; his bourgeois adoptive brother Georges is not completely free of complicity either - and nor, perhaps, is the audience.

Certainly, in my present, grey suits run a technocracy that adheres, slavishly, to a set of ideas based on a hierarchy of race, ethnicity, culture, class, gender and sexuality about how people should be governed and what their lives and deaths are worth. The Stasi were a most extreme face of governmental/regimental technologies that can and will be deployed by any state, and these days the technologies of surveillance, censorship, torture and incarceration-without-trial are being used across the liberal-democratic world. Suspected ‘terrorists’ in capitalist liberal democracies are treated in comparable ways to ‘enemies of the people’ in socialist totalitarian states.

These technologies are not the province of a pathological socialist regime, they are not the province of foreign men in black and white with subtitles, they are the province of anyone who wants to hold on to governmental power and especially when it is being questioned by those who don’t think that surveillance, censorship, torture and incarceration should be part of governance. But The Lives of Others suggested nothing of this; instead we are asked to swallow (like in La Vita é Bella/Life is Beautiful, another Best Foreign Film winner) a transcendant, redemptive humanity which is the exception to every nasty system created by evil non-humans. Can’t do it, even if it is just because I’ve been thinking/reading too much.

It’s terribly unfortunate but I shall be in Melbourne whence BugGiRL next plays. Sigh. What’s not to love about a band who produces something like this?

Umberto Eco suggests that we currently live in a new Dark Ages. I believe him: feudalism, superstition, despotism, the falling away of culture, of civil organisation, the rigidity of inequality, scorched earth, hysteria. We even will darkness on ourselves; atonement for the darkness daily growing in our bellies.

Rebecca Solnit thinks that there is hope in the dark. And I do have hope, though there is little in my secular, suspicious, spleeny vocabulary that can account for this.

I am feeling my way in the dark. But I am not hoping for Enlightenment. Running from darkness just invites more of it. If I look back, I misfire. In staring down the dark present, Nietzsche’s abyss, I can only hope.

(Image from: crummy.)

I had full intentions tonight of writing something about the particular weight of the world at the moment. But then …..

I *am* writing about aid work and fetishism, but really ….