archive : s0metim3s

I keep bumping into literary references, or perhaps they bump into me. Sometimes more literally than literary and so more bumpy than I’d like, or the references are more acutely visceral than I’d prefer. At other times with surprise and delight, or simply as a prompt to overtly read what is sensed, is there.

My two remarks (and a half) at the Measure for Measure workshop:

One

The border is that place, or set of procedures, through which the distinction, but also the acquaintance, between value and use-value is arranged. In that sense, the border deliberates upon a kind of dialectic, the filtering of differences by indifference and abstraction, the imposition of measures of both what is useful – as in what particular kinds of skilled labour, and the very definition of skill, that may be useful to any given national economy – and what is different (or indifferent) in an innovatory sense. In this regard, the border is a filter. And, as with the categories of value, the encounter at the border here is an encounter of terms that that are internal to capital.

Here’s the text of a talk - “Ordinary poverty and sores” - given by Elizabeth Povinelli at Charles Darwin University’s workshop “Indigenous policy reform in the NT: An extraordinary debate for extraordinary times”, on 20 July 2007.

Why are these exceptional times? Why is time exceptional now? What is exceptional about it? I have been living down at Channel Point, a place called Balgal, with a group of Aboriginal men, women and children who were driven out of their homes at Belyuen by other men, women, and children – their families to be sure, but wielding axes, chainsaws, pickets, and rocks. They ransacked their houses, stole their goods, and chased them into the scrub. No one was charged. The police investigation seemed minimal at best. Without any foreseeable housing in Darwin, and not wishing to live as part of the urban radical poor, they were promised housing at Balgal. Months later they are still living in tents, hauling water, firewood, as non-Aboriginal people live in houses just kilometers away on Aboriginal land. Not lease land, but unalienable Aboriginal freehold. And the government continues to pressure them to return to Belyuen where they risk slow death. Why cost, of course. Because as much as we hear that these are extraordinary times, they are also ordinary times; the same time it’s always been for the radically poor and black. The bottom line is the bottom line: What kind of life is worth what kind of investment? The rain is coming, everyone knows; perhaps the rain will push these families back.

Following on from remarks on the frontier, and touching upon questions of the extraterritorialisation of borders, courtesy of Pom, some passages from Paul Silverstein’s “The New Barbarians: Piracy and Terrorism on the North African Frontier” (CR, 5:1, 2005):

In “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” (SAQ, 101:4, 2002), Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff take the discussion of flexibilisation and changing conditions of work (from Tronti to Harvey) into a discussion of South Africa, migrant workers and more.

“The US decision to ban torture may hinder the fight against terrorism, [Australian] Attorney-general Philip Ruddock has said.” [+]

For this sentence - and this ideology - to make sense, either “terrorism” has to be defined as something other than indeed terrorising someone - through, say, torturing them. Or torture has to be redefined as something other than the incitement of terror. And presumably sleep deprivation - which, if prolonged, makes someone completely wig out, among other things - isn’t really torture. Which is to say: The US decision to ban terrorising people torture may hinder the fight against those activities defined by the US and other governments as terrorism.

What follows are fragments, with some modification, pulled from notes for a longer study on Lucretius, which explains the Latin turns and preoccupations – they barely amount to a reading of Schmitt’s “The Theory of the Partisan”, from which my attention kept veering. Xposted to the Long Sunday symposium, which continues for the rest of the week, and likely to have more sustained engagements with Schmitt than offered here.

Carl Schmitt is not, I think, the 20th century’s most persistent philosopher of the political but of the mos maiorum – which is to say, politics conceived as the inheritance, codification and preservation of a ‘way of life’. In Schmitt’s writings, as in Lucretius’s time, the mos maiorum ascends to conceptual reverence in the midst of and as a symptom of its crisis.