°Locking down sovereignty
So, this weekend, Sydney’s beaches were - this is a term that will fast become normalised - subjected to a ‘lockdown’. This meant that only the residents of beachside suburbs could go to the beach. This being precisely what the pogrom at Cronulla sought to accomplish, to make what is contingent reassert itself as necessity, as natural. Such an affable term, ‘resident’. But this much is clear: the organisation of landed property and Crown land (which is what coastlines are in AU), today as much as yesterday, is dependant on violence, colonisation and borders.
Elsewhere on the partioning of the world: Qunilan Vos on Parenti’s left-wing patriotism. Jason Adams on the infinite multiplication of borders in US migration controls. On the introduction of public order laws in Austin (Texas), at Recording Surface. Antipopper on CAPTCHAring and recognising the human. Anthony Iles and Ben Seymour on the struggles against gentrification in Hackney, on MetaMute.
And, gathering some fragments related to landed property: Althusser’s aleatory materialism, Virno’s frontier/border distinction, Marx and Deleuze-Guattari on landed property and rent. More obscurely, it occurs to me that Wittgenstein writes somewhere that all propositions presuppose a calculus - I will have to go searching for the reference.
Also, Paul Patton on that peculiar invention of Crown land and landed property:
The fundamental jurisprudential problem of colonisation is therefore the manner in which the territorial domains of the prior inhabitants become transformed into a uniform space of landed property. This points to the fundamental role played by law in the capture of indigenous peoples and their territories: ‘law, regarded by the West as its most respected and cherished instrument of civilisation, was also the West’s most vital and effective instrument of empire … above all … Europe’s conquest of the New World was a legal enterprise’ (Williams 1990: 6). Law was particularly important in the case of those settler societies established by the British Crown relatively late in the European diaspora such as Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/ New Zealand. These were colonies which from the outset were supposed to be governed in accordance with British common law. As a result, the basis of their property law lay in the feudal doctrine of tenure whereby all title to land is ultimately derived from the Crown. The Crown is the ultimate authority with regard to ownership of land in the territory and the centre of appropriation and alienation of land title. By virtue of its right of sovereignty or imperium, the Crown has the power both to create and extinguish private rights and interests in land. In this sense, Crown land amounts to a uniform expanse of potential real property which covers the earth to the extent of the sovereign territory. It follows that, within these common-law jurisdictions, the imposition of sovereignty constitutes an apparatus of capture in the precise sense which Deleuze and Guattari give to this term. The legal imposition of sovereignty effects an instantaneous deterritorialization of indigenous territories and their reterritorialization as a uniform space of Crown land centred upon the figure of the sovereign.
Do you think that the jurisprudential aspect of colonialism matters? Let me put that another way: the landscape of private property only pulls itself up by its bootstraps as seen from the perspective of private property. From the perspective of, say, the people who lost the land, it remains stuck in the mud.
Alma da Maquina [December 20, 2005 @ 10:09 am]
I’m not sure I understand the bootstraps and mud motifs, but in case I do get the drift of the question: Force is what matters, what bodies do is what matters. But the recourse to legal positivism - the ‘this is a law and order issue’ as well as the naturalised figure of the ‘resident’ or ‘local’, among other things - is nevertheless meaningful. And has to be taken apart.
Not least because this is the point at which it becomes possible to explain the intersections between national labour markets and the events at Cronulla. Against all the attempts to refound ‘multicultural Australia’, against all the accounts of racism as separate to relations of property, against the proliferation of borders and corporatisms. It’s about property, what is proper.
s0metim3s [December 20, 2005 @ 11:39 am]