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drafting …

On February 12th, an estimated two thousand people converged on Australia’s Federal Parliament complex to protest against what has, quite plainly, become known as the Intervention. It should not go without saying that this particular euphemism derives not only from the discourses surrounding ‘failed states’ – and the reference to such was more than explicit – but also that of drug rehabilitation programmes in which, as the exercise claims, someone is helped to recognise the extent of their problem. The convergence of a humanitarian militarism with welfare and medical practices – literally, Intervention teams consisting of nurses, soldiers, doctors and police – turns around the proposition of a failure of self-control. Indigenous self-determination has failed. Multiculturalism has failed. Aborigines cannot control themselves when exposed to pornography. Or alcohol. Or children. And so on.

Or so it is made to appear, despite the absence of any quantitative evidence on rates of child abuse, alcoholism and the apparently deleterious effects of pornography that are not conditioned by a very particular, and prior, demarcation between public and private domains, the organisation of what appears, when and how.

Metamute have an excellent article by Beth Povinelli on the ‘national emergency’, “Doing it for the Kids”. Here’s the piece I did for darkmatter, “The Materialisation of Race in Multiculture” (still forthcoming on their site).

Both of those turn around similar questions: of multiculturalism’s ostensible failure and what this precipitates, of the amplifications of the entrepreneurial subject (Beth’s focus) and (what interested me on this occasion) of the contract and notions of self-sufficient subjectivity (understandings of which are indebted to Beth’s previous writings).

But it seems necessary to focus at this juncture on the postcript to “Doing it for the Kids”, because these are the circumstances to be confronted, and they have to be confronted in the midst of a massive redeployment of affective economy around page-turnings, back-turnings, tears and healing.

[Recent television ad for right-wing newspaper, The Australian.]

In the chapter “Of Commandment”, Mbembe turns over some significant dispositions of colonial sovereignty. On one of those, he writes:

It is about a week away, but since the Government declared that it was “Australia Week” - and not just “Australia Day” - I thought I’d begin the gglehack early. (You only have to click the one link, it’s all the same. Which is how it should be on Australia Day, I suppose.)

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Responding to Government plans to introduce an English-language and Australian values test for prospective citizens, senator Barnaby Joyce (who often holds the deciding vote in the Senate) said: “We’re trying to stop people who have militant ideas who want to destroy our nation - I’ve got no problem with that whatsoever”. He added, “What has to be proven is whether an English test is going to do it - most wackos are very well-educated.”

An excerpt from Nicos Poulantzas’ State, Power, Socialism (1978):

[Large-scale industry] involves as its precondition an entirely different spatial matrix: the serial, fractured, parcelled, cellular and irreversible space which is peculiar to the Taylorist division of labour on the factory assembly line. Although this space also becomes homogeneous in the end, it does so only through a second-degree homogenization, which arises on the basis of its essential segmentations and gaps. […] it is composed of gaps, breaks, successive fracturings, closures and frontiers; but it has no end: the capitalist labour process tends towards world-wide application (expanded co-operation). […] In this modern space, people change position ad infinitum by traversing separations in which each place is defined by its distance from others; they spread out in this space by assimilating and homogenizing new segments in the act of shifting their frontiers.

Following on from the Government’s various assertions that migrants should commit to ‘Australian values’ as a condition of their migration, Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has just announced that not only prospective migrants, but that all visa applicants, including tourists, should be required to ’sign off’ on a list of said ‘Australian values.’