°National Emergency
The introductory sketch from a draft below. See also the posts and discussion at Influxus, Wildly Parenthetical, Hoyden, Stilgherrian and Shrike. And just let me say that I think those people who, rather than criticise the welfare measures announced, clamour (in the putative language of non-discrimination) for their extension to everyone (really: all poor people) are worse than stupid. Anyway, here’s part of the draft:
On June 22nd 2007, the Australian Prime Minister declared a de facto state of emergency over remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. The overt reason given for this extraordinary move was the protection of children from abuse – or, more specifically, its occasion was the release of the report by the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse in the Northern Territory.
There have been countless other reports on the conditions, often described as “Fourth World”, that many indigenous peoples endure, particularly in remote areas – abuse, deaths in police custody, terrible rates of life expectancy and infant mortality and, not least, destitution. Neverthless, the measures so far announced under this state of emergency proffer a rather dubious theory of the causes of child abuse, suggesting that the principal question being posed (and answered) here is not, in fact, that of how to stop children being abused. Those measures include the banning of alcohol and x-rated pornography, the attachment of normative conditions to welfare payments, and the suspension of (what is currently in some cases) communal titles over indigenous land and local controls over the movement through them.
One could remark here that the report’s title – Little Children Are Sacred – already speaks volumes about the restoration of a centuries-long coincidence between governmental “Aboriginal Protection” agencies and Church missions that had – prior to the more recent transfer of land titles to some indigeneous communities – assumed the task of the “protection” and conversion of indigenous peoples into hardworking Christians. Appearing toward the end of a period of wars of colonisation and the removal of indigeneous peoples from their lands, the doctrine of protection emerged upon claims of an impending “extinction” and through the institutional practice of removing children (in many cases, those deemed to be “half-caste”) and placing them in, for the most part, missions under policies of assimilation. But this often tragic history – and the widespread abuse that occurred in missions until very recently is also well-documented – cannot fully explain the revival of a missionary approach in these times. Just as the Australian Government has increasingly subcontracted health and welfare functions to Church organisations in recent years, so too has the US Government, and on a global scale; going so far as to refuse funding to, for instance, HIV/AIDS organisations in Africa and Asia that distribute condoms, do not preach abstinence and seek harm reduction.
One could, moreover, easily point to the parallels with the events around the Tampa, the military seizure and interdiction in 2001, by the Australian Government, of the Norwegian freighter that had rescued over 300 undocumented migrants from drowning – not to mention the allegation by Government Ministers some time later, since exposed as a lie but generally believed as plausible at the time, that undocumented migrants were ‘throwing their children overboard’. The Tampa event preceded an election the Government was widely expected to lose; as does this. In both these instances, what have been ongoing and widely-reported occurrences (undocumented boat arrivals and child abuse) were reconstructed as singularly alarming events providing the pretext for authoritarian displays of sovereignty – that is, declarations of an exceptional situation demanding, without question, the suspension of the normal functioning of the law so as to restore the presumed integrity of the Australian body politic.
Which is to say, one could also recall here of the sense in which Giorgio Agamben’s analyses of homo sacer – ‘the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereign’ (1998:84) – and the exception have resonated in Australia, well beyond a philosophical idiom or the supposedly temporary or recent exceptions enacted under the “War on Terror”. Here, that is, much of Agamben’s work was translated as the stark question of a persistent fracture within and of the postcolony. Among other things, Australia’s was the first Western government to introduce the automatic and indefinite internment of undocumented migrants, the extraterritorialisation of detention camps to the Pacific, and the excision of parts of Australia from the ‘migration zone’ for the purposes of evading habeas corpus and the functioning of asylum laws and conventions.
Much of this rests firmly on Australia’s history as a penal colony and its record as a mostly anxious outpost of Imperial power. It might be noted that this latter aspect is evident in the recent occupation of countries in the Asia-Pacific by Australian military and police. Nevertheless, such exercises are presently conducted under the rhetoric of ‘failed states’ and humanitarian intervention – with little, if any, opposition voiced against such from within Australia, so deeply entrenched and seductive is this disposition of benevolence. And, it might also be remarked that this most recent declared emergency in the northern parts of Australia closely resembles this discourse of ‘failed states’ and its practices – though this time as an “internal” re-colonisation. All of this is to suggest that Agamben’s eloquent account of the sovereign exception and ‘bare life’ are helpful, but insufficient to explaining what is transpiring in the detail, as a process.
To understand much of what has been occurring here it is crucial, I would argue, to re-pose the question of the frontier – and of the relation between border and frontier – as a question of the scalable techniques of the contract. Before elaborating on this, let me turn to the frontier (and the border) as these are understood according to a Euro-American perspective. This is less to propose that such a view remains applicable in Europe or the US than that it emerges in the context of a modernist dialectic of a figural Europe and a European idea of America. This dialectic – even as it re-acquires a certain purchase due to technics and various ambassadorial manoeuvreings around so-called US unilateralism – is a partial understanding of the world and, for that matter, of the conditions and conflicts that increasingly obtain in Europe and the US. It is, to put it another way, a perfectly Hegelian dialectic proclaiming the inexorable movement of the European Spirit through a world delineated by zones in which there is history, norm and contractual peace (that is, mutually agreed upon borders) and frontier regions, those marked by perpetual war, deemed to be a natural state (what in Social Contract theory is presented as the “state of nature” and in Hegel as the absence of history, historical change and epochality), and where the seeming perpetuity of misery is oftentimes explained in racialising terms as the inherent condition of groups of people or as anomalous or foreign to the norm.
I will come back to this, but let me note that this is in no way to argue for an impartial perspective. On the contrary, it is to suggest that the perspective from the other side of the frontier becomes crucial to challenging the re-inscription of colonial forms of governance in metropolitan spaces (such as the internment camps; the recourse, during the riots in the banlieues, to the 1955 law that allowed curfews in Algeria by French colonial authorities) – measures derived, as Mezzadra and Rahola (2003) have remarked, from the conduct of ‘total war’ in the colonies – as well as the (re-)colonisation of spaces on the grounds of their depiction, whether utopically or dystopically, as frontier spaces. This involves a transformation not only of the very sense of the frontier (not least as it becomes deployed in prominent analyses of technics, labour, war and the exception) but also the border. […]
People at work send Crikey stuff.
This is another from Guy Rundle…
Liz
liz [June 26, 2007 @ 8:52 am]
from here.
ps. Liz - I’ll have a think about the other stuff and get back to you.
s0metim3s [June 26, 2007 @ 5:08 pm]
As a non-australian, fill me in… Was this planned? Would this have happened without the child abuse report being published
? And what is the level of racism at the moment in Australian society that seems to make this acceptable? Is this an election ploy or something pseudo-political like that? Is this significantly different from the treatment of Palestinians?
slumberous [June 29, 2007 @ 5:05 pm]
I’m only speculating, but I wouldn’t say ‘planned’ - in the sense that it was, for months or perhaps even weeks, timed to coincide with the release of this particular report.
It seems more likely that the relevant Minister (Brough) and the Prime Minister (Howard) discussed the report and then, after a phone call (not to the report’s authors, but) to Noel Pearson, set about pursuing an agenda (or a combination of agendas) that they’ve had an attachment to for many years.
As for the racism in AU, though I assume it’s widespread and deep-seated, I still find myself reeling at times. But this particular expression has that lovely combination of postures that appeals to both overt racists (the demeanour of the ‘crackdown’) and the more ‘moderate’ racism that takes the form of benevolence, paternalism, etc.
In this regard, maybe it’s a little different to the treatment of Palestinians - in this instance here in AU, collective punishment is accompanied by measures that are supposed to distinguish between those who can take “responsibility” (and self-manage or self-discipline) and those who cannot. Though, now that I think of it, this latter is also the distinction currently being played out in the ‘Hamas vs Fatah’ intrigues, funding flows/stops, etc. So, maybe not so different after all.
s0metim3s [June 29, 2007 @ 7:59 pm]
Elizabeth Povinelli gave a talk in Helsinki this spring that addressed some of these issues. It was called ‘The Child in the Basement: States of Killing and Letting Die.’ Povinelli wants to understand the background assumptions informing the ways that liberal democracies like Australia can ignore (whilst also creating) forms of everyday suffering and death (those that might be described as ‘crummy’), especially in marginalized groups. Thus, she wanted to cross a critique of sovereign power based in the spectacular politics of ‘the emergency’ with a critqiue of sovereign power based in the crummy politics of ‘letting die’ (and compare Biehl on Brazil). A lot of her talk was simply about skin infections in aborigines that are never tested or treated and that are tolerated by Australian medical authorities in ways that are appalling.
I am intrigued, sOmetim3s, by your sense that a turn to Agamben is insufficient to explain what is happening in detail (as in the quote excerpted above by Kerim). Can you say more? My own sense is that a turn to Agamben to model or understand these uses of ‘emergency’ to legitimate and inscribe ’sovereign’ power is fine, although it really is just a redescription in critical terms of what governments like Howard’s think they are doing. It as though a critique based in the legal theories of the right is allowed to stand for an analysis of the whole cultural field.
The one thing that stuck with me in Povinelli’s talk was her riffing off of a text by Usula Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” to understand the moral logic of liberalism and its utopian fantasy that some day, some where, the promises of a liberal society will pay off. It is the futurity of liberal promises that enables everday sufferings in the present to be ignored or concealed. (These are complicated arguments and I would love to have a discussion in the future about Povinelli’s critique of liberal multiculturalism in Australia…)
Strong [July 1, 2007 @ 8:26 pm]
I kind of agree with you about Agamben. Though it’s not so much that I mind the recasting of Schmittian theory (even if I have criticisms of that). It’s more that for Agamben I think that there’s this unexplained gap between - to put it in Agamben’s terms - those who exist in the condition of bare life and those who can assume a sovereign disposition. I think this has led to a lot of nonsense being said about ‘bare life’ having the same analytical status as the concept of ‘labour-power’.
But, maybe more importantly, it’s meant that, even though Agamben insists against it, given the way he talks about the condition of bare life, there’s a discursive pull toward the recovery or assertion of rights for those who have none.
If that’s still making sense, I’m interested in the processes by which people are filtered between (how to put it?) the technologies of self and those of sovereignty - with the ‘remainder’ being (as you note) left to die. I think the concept and workings of the contract are here key.
In this instance of the ’state of emergency’, a good deal of those measures being applied are to do with getting indigenous people to behave in certain normative ways (like make your kids go to school), to be ‘responsible individuals’ (if they don’t want their welfare cut).
Povinelli would, I suspect, say this is an impossible and crazy-making predicament: there aren’t enough schools to send your children to, they’re run down, there aren’t enough teachers - so the purportedly mutual obligation of the social contract is a cover for punitive action against most, and the filtering of ‘rewards’ (like welfare) for some who can manage to jump through the hoops. And it’s meant to be crazy-making, since it seeks to internalise responsibility (for ’success’ and ‘failure’). Meritocratic rubbish, basically.
I guess I’m interested in the modulations between the technologies of self and those of sovereignty. For me, that ‘between’ is the border. The frontier is the place where the emergency is declared over, populations deemed superfluous (to production, among other things).
On Povinelli :) You know, I’d been wandering around while thinking about this stuff complaining that I didn’t have Povinelli’s Recognition book on hand, and insisting that everyone should be reading it. That comes from being amazed at how little or not very widely her work is read here, or beyond anthro circles. For instance, it took Sarapen from Canada to point me to her writing a little while ago.
If you haven’t already come across his work, I’d recommend Mbembe (with some reservations).
And I think Povinelli is right about the problems of futurity (or is it infinitude?). There’s some stuff I wrote about Hamacher and the promise here (and a there’s a little bit from here that takes some distance from Derridean takes on the promise as well). And isn’t the promise so crucial to the very thinking of the contract? And I’m still trying to get my head around the connections between border, contract and temporality - some very preliminary sketches of that mid-way here.
s0metim3s [July 1, 2007 @ 9:05 pm]
I can’t find my copy, but WRT comparisons of current Australian state action to Save The Children and Israel’s ‘management’ of Palestinians in the context of Fatah-Hamas conflict, I think Adam Hanieh et al.’s book “Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel’s detention of Palestinian Children” indicates that - though the form of disciplining is in some ways as different as Australian is from Israeli settler-colonialism - there are in both cases distinct tactics involved in the control of children which violently relate to broader political purposes. With the emergence of Israel’s ‘concern’ for Palestinians under the control of Hamas, I think that the further emergence of parallel ‘humanitarian’ discourses is actually a strong possibility, though the routine assertion of Israel’s ’security interests’ would probably always overshadow any such tactics.
benjamin rosenzweig [July 1, 2007 @ 9:30 pm]
Thank you for responding. I am working on understanding Agamben and what the fuss is about, so your thoughts here are useful. I think you are right about what Povinelli might argue — that telling people who are systematically marginalized that they have to show their worth (culturally, materially, or both) in order to be included in liberalism’s warm embrace is just absurd.
strong [July 3, 2007 @ 3:28 am]
And maybe it’s not working out as Howard had hoped. I guess it’s become such a pattern (Tampa, ‘children overboard’), it’s no longer flying. Which is good and relieving news - but it’s not at all clear where Rudd/ALP differ.
s0metim3s [July 3, 2007 @ 4:54 pm]
Looks like the first test of how rough its going to get is here:
Amoonguna community has refused entry to their community (the permit system is still in place but I’m not sure for how much longer).
Talked to a mate in a community a few hundred kms from Alice today who reckons the cops are due in next week. Now that word has spread that Amoonguna has refused entry, others are now talking about doing the same. I suppose that will dictate how quickly they move to demolish the permit system… and the first reports of helpful cops bashing women whilst attempting to “rescue” them from domestic violence are in…
http://www.abc.net.au/message/news/stories/ms_news_1968070.htm
And there have been attempts to occupy Australian embassy in New Zealand
http://uriohau.blogspot.com/
has more on this
liz [July 3, 2007 @ 6:22 pm]
Go Amoonguna! Hermannsburg aren’t so keen either, particularly as the arrival of the ‘taskforce’ was announced to occur at the same time as two funerals.
s0metim3s [July 3, 2007 @ 7:13 pm]
You might like to note that both Marie Ellis & Richard Lisiak (CDEP guru!!!) did indeed meet with members of the taskforce this week. ABC news in the NT had the report on at 7pm. Report about the impending visit can be seen in the Alice Springs News. http://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/
Furthermore, I am currently at Hermannsburg and they are here right this minute!! Can’t say it’s ‘rough’. Family mob here are listening, wanting to know more, but very cautious. They do want things to change, though. People are sick of the trouble from grog in a dry community.
There was also a very important joint management meeting (for the West Macs National Park) on today which has suffered a lot from the intrusion. The Ntaria Community Rangers have just finshed their first commercial contract for Parks in the campground at Palm Valley and it’s awesome.
Why isn’t anyone picking up on the all the great joint management stuff that’s happening in the NT at the moment?
AJ [July 11, 2007 @ 4:35 pm]
AJ
what great joint management stuff are you talking about? Can you post more info?
And my comment about things potentially getting rough was in relation to communities who might refuse entry…. I’m assuming Hermannsburg community ultimately gave permission? If not, would like to know more…. well - would like to know more anyway actually….
liz [July 11, 2007 @ 5:18 pm]
Hey Liz,
Yes, Hermannsburg gave permission … after a lot of discussion. It was tense yesterday when I arrived, but better today.
Let me just say that despite what is getting published in the media elsewhere, there is absolutely no way that the Commonwealth government has the resources to pull any of this off without the help of the NT government, Aboriginal organisations and Community Councils. So, they can try all the bullying they like, but in the end it just won’t work. They will have to come to the table and consult with the people who count. They are on a very steep learning curve at the moment, let me tell you. I wish I had a video camera today!
I’ve been back & forth between meetings today with people who are trying to be in two or three places at once. I’m very, very tired - it’s been an intense couple of days for everyone. I’ve just got back home. So this is just a quick post.
About joint management. The NT government, with lots of help from the Land Councils, negotiated with Traditional Owners to hand back 27 parks and reserves to Aboriginal people in 2004. The legislation for this was passed in March 2005. Since then, the Parks Service, Land Councils & Traditional Owners have embarked on an amazing journey.
One result of this has been over 100 projects employing nearly 200 (don’t quote me though!) Aboriginal people on parks & in training, 12 new full time Aboriginal employees in Parks last year and another 12 this year (3 new ones started in Alice Springs & Tennant Ck last week), several new community ranger groups, 2 new Aboriginal businesses and best of all … full legal recognition of Traditional Ownership and native title rights without any court cases.
Here’s some info:
http://www.clc.org.au/OurLand/ntnationalparks.asp
http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/parks/management/jointmanagement.html
Have a look at some of the stories and articles on the pages that link to these sites. I can supply more, but hopefully this will give you a heads up on what’s happening here. It’s hard work, but going along well.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t get a mention down south.
AJ [July 12, 2007 @ 7:27 pm]
any of this off
Pull what off?
s0metim3s [July 12, 2007 @ 8:58 pm]
Not really sure what you mean by the comment, but I’ll do my best. ‘Pull it off’ was just a turn of phrase.
Anyway, this is a bit about what happened today at Hermannsburg. I was at another meeting across the river concerned with something totally different, and just running people back and forth, so it’s patchy.
From what I saw and what people who went to the meetings said, they (the members of the taskforce) weren’t doing very much today except talking. This was in meetings at the clinic and the Ntaria community council. One meeting was aimed at explaining to people that no check up on any individual can legally take place unless that person agrees to it. Another point was that was being put out by the health workers was that nothing would be done unless the Hermannsburg community agrees to it.
There’s a lot of people who will be staying in the community (nurses, doctors, counselling staff, Norforce personnel)for the next two weeks who were not certain as about what they’re supposed to be doing.
Had a chat to some of the Norforce (army) people today. They’re not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be doing either.
What came out of one meeting today was that the main problem in Hermannsberg was a few people bringing in grog (no surprise there), and the taskforce doesn’t appear to have any evidence of anything else.
Had a chat to the people from the Finke River Mission Store who I know quite well, too. They are equally in the dark as to what is actually going to be achieved by the taskforce. Usually, they are the people in-the-know. We did have a good chat about trashing model airplanes and flying ultra-light aircraft, though!
AJ [July 12, 2007 @ 11:01 pm]