archive : s0metim3s

From Graeme Philipson’s piece in the Age:

If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion. They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

While the borders proliferate, they’re being proposed as the means to stem proliferations of another kind. The leak of the US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement is here, scheduled to be discussed at the G8 in Tokyo, next month.

From Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas, by Gillian Cowlishaw, in the chapter titled “Enjoying Democracy”:

the paraphernalia of everyday life on a station was a compelling element in the pastoralists’ domination of their untutored workers; the mastery of pragmatic technology confirmed their grasp of the meaning of the world. It is technologies of governance, systems of political representation, of funding and accountability and practices known as democracy, which are now being taught with the same assumptions as were attached to farming technologies in an earlier time. These are the necessary tools for the Aboriginal people’s future, an invariant reality, a morally neutral common sense. Aborigines are now being enticed into exercising the same rights as whitefellas, rights which are supposed to ensure that we are all equal citizens.

Sharply ironic.

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.

This, from Michael O’Donnell’s review of Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy:

Rejali’s provocative thesis is that most clean tortures were actually born in democracies, especially imperial Britain and France. He persuasively argues that the rise of clean torture was a reaction to transparency and monitoring in democratic states: Torturers could carry on despite public scrutiny as long as they left no scars. Although Rejali does not discuss it, this thesis plays out daily in the American legal system. Immigration courts, for instance, handle thousands of asylum applications every year, and judges usually demand that alleged torture victims produce evidence of scarring or hospitalization. No scars means no torture, and the applicant is sent home.

What would it mean to explore precariousness without seeking to resolve its tensions, to regard it as the space of experimentation whose significance is reducible neither to a catastrophe brought down from some transcendental realm nor the destruction of a prior commonplace considered to be the premise of antagonism as such? Both of these approaches, in understanding precariousness as the unconditioned consequence of a capitalist strategy for decomposing an identity that was neither universal nor indisputably (or effectively) antagonistic, constrain politics to the eliciting of a victimised, at times emasculated, subject. Here, capital assumes a god-like demeanour; and it is not surprising that politics becomes ever-more theological, as the prayer that the state might deliver us from its own contingencies through a codification of rights or in the recourse to an explicitly Christian figuration of Lenin.

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.

[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: