archive : s0metim3s

this cult of continuity, the confident assumption of knowing to whom and to what we owe our existence - whence the importance of the idea of ‘origins’ – Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”

What passes for legal tender is a convention for the reckoning of debts – and a legalised violence steps in where convention falters.

… there is no foundation in nature or in natural law, why a set of words upon a parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so, before him … - William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).

And here’s a pdf for the frontier household piece.

An excerpt, still in draft, of “The Household Frontier,” written with Melinda Cooper:

Dion Dennis, from “Domestic Wars Redux: Obama, Digital Prohibition and the New ‘Reefer Madness’” (CTheory):

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.