not the motorcycle diaries

1. The Lajamanu Walpiri community responds to police violation of a ceremonial area.

2. Steve Jampijinpa explains the five pillars of Warlpiri culture.

For those of you not spending today delivering on your democratic right to give dead arms (oh the semantics …), listen up yo!

This is another urge I’ve had for some time, spurred on today by this news report about the state of the Australian stock market*. Just look at these words:

a day of carnage

its worst one-day fall since 1989

fears the slowdown is spreading across the world

dived

slumped

No sectors secure from the hammering

deeply in the red

crashed skyrocketed

tipping point

There is so little use of terms that even imply economy, don’t you think? It’s all terrifying excess.

*Are shares the same as stocks?

Particularly since the NT intervention lurched onto the public scene last year, I feel the urge to keep up the critique of government and non-government ‘helping’ regimes. I’ve quoted it before, and I’ll quote it now: “the judgement ‘good’ was not invented by those to whom goodness was shown!” (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality).

So. On this. Whilst flicking through the notes I had made whilst I was overseas, I was reminded to share this little gem with the critiquitariat: Arzu Rugs. It was advertised in an aeroplane magazine, I forget which one. At first glance it seemed to be the usual marketing package of decorative non-western crafts attached to a charity venture: ‘conscious’ consumption with an ‘ethnic’ feel. Arzu brokers the sale of rugs crafted by Afghan women, “creating opportunities for women to obtain a consistent income”. But their trade has an even sharper twist than similar ‘fair trade’ products: it’s not just money, its empowerment, too, apparently:

“Core to the Arzu approach is our social contract with weaver families where we agree to pay the weavers market rate for their weaving, plus an additional 50% bonus on top-quality carpets.

In return for this higher wage, families must agree to send all of their children under age 15 to school full-time and to have at least one woman from each household attend literacy classes. Where children cannot attend a government school, Arzu partners with education providers and pays for classes to be set up in villages. Since most girls are well behind the education standards for their age group, Arzu funds “Fast Track” classes so they can catch up and join their peers at a government school wherever possible.”

This is a remarkably explicit ‘contract’ imposed on ‘third world women’ by ‘first world women’ in the name of salvation from the consequences of imperialist wars brought to the former by the kinsmen of the latter. I mean, those girls and women should sure be grateful. I wonder what they did before Western intervention in their lives?

“Say about deconstruction, these international Web sites welcome and juxtapose extremely serious discussions, or ones that are publishable, and then chitchat that is not just dreary, but also without any possible future.

(It is true, and don’t let’s ever forget it, that that can also happen at conferences and in journals, academic and otherwise).”
- ‘The Word Processor’ in Paper Machine, p.32

“Friendship is never a given in the present; it belongs to the experience of waiting, of promise, or of commitment. Its discourse is that of prayer and at issue there is that which responsibility opens to the future. (…) this minimal community … this preliminary consent without which you would not understand me … speaking the same language or praying for translation within the horizon of the same language, even were it so to manifest a disagreement … we would not be together … if a sort of friendship had not already been sealed before any other contract: a friendship prior to friendship, an ineffaceable, fundamental and bottomless friendship, the one which draws its breath in the sharing of a language (past or to come) and in the being-together that any allocution supposes.”

- Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, The Journal of Philosophy, 1988 pp. 636.

Back in Australia, back at uni, I slide into a second day in the desk chair and feel my re-institutionalization clicking over. I take heart from Meaghan Morris, 20 years ago in The Pirate’s Fiancée (1988, pp.8-10), a collection penned from her interstitial point between the ‘popular’ and ‘academic’ writing worlds:

“… the experience of moving between a number of different social sites of debate and discussion about cultural politics has also left me very cautious about some aspects of recent attempts to come to terms with the limitations and specificities of ‘academic’ practice.

On the one hand, Foucault’s notion of the ’specific intellectual’, for example, has been particularly useful both in allowing institutional struggles to occupy a field of ‘everyday life’ rather than being relegated to an ‘ivory tower’ divorced from a ‘real world’ and in making it possible to criticize the moment in which a theory ‘mistakes the liberal academy as the collective subject of a universally useful knowledge’ [quote from David Bennett, 1987]. Feminism has both profited from, and helped to produce, this kind of reconceptualization of academic politics. On the other hand, something slightly different seems to be happening when it becomes possible to claim, as Paul Smith does in an essay in Men in Feminism, that post-structuralist feminist theory ‘however “feminist” it may be, and howsoever “feminist” is construed - does not exist outside the academy‘ (my emphasis). Smith stresses in a note that he is referring only to what is known ‘in the academic vernacular as feminist theory (the structuralist/poststructuralist variety)’.

…

One must be passionately careful here, precisely because to state that a given activity has ‘no existence’ outside one’s own immediate sphere of operations is to accept and reinforce as absolute, rather than to challenge and transform, prevailing local conventions about the available places from which people (and in this case, feminists) can be allowed to be saying something. (…) [W]hen we begin to come to terms with this development it becomes impossible to claim that a given theoretical activity ‘does not exist outside’ the academy. This can only be true in an academy imagined as without students who do not proceed to become professors, or with students who remain untouched by their own working experiences.

Furthermore, this academy functions in a world without bookshops, without ‘amateur’ readers and writers of theoretical work, without theorizing artists, without those ambiguous ‘art-world’ figures (critics, and especially curators) who can frame artists’ work as ‘theoretical’ whether they wish it so or not, without TV chat-shows and intellectual talking-heads, without interviews, without media jokes about semiotics and poststructuralism, without private reading groups, without public forums, without young film-school graduates making both small film-essays and big blockbusters, without other than academic audiences for any of these, or anyone anywhere to go on to make something different from them: it is a world without any ‘dissemination’ of ideas, and finally without the rampant commodification of thought and feeling that makes it possible to speak of ‘Theory’ - in a vernacular sense - as a practice, as a problem, as a genre, and as a ‘zone’ of possible contestation.

…

Without worrying about the disconnections and failures of intellectual work, we cannot transform it politically. Yet one of the most important consequences of the notion of the ’specific intellectual’ is not to translate specificity as ‘confinement’, but rather to begin to accept firstly that work produced in an academic context (even the writings of Foucault, even poststructuralist feminist theory) can be used and rewritten in unpredictable ways (and various media) elsewhere: and secondly that this movement can run the other way: academic theorization can and should transform its practices by learning from the experiences, the concepts and the methodologies developed by people in broader social and political movements.”