The Aardklop festival grounds were awash with odors representing the opposite ends of the digestive tract of a not too healthy human when I visited it on the final day of the festival this year. Approaching the grounds from the North I was greeted by the sounds of a singer liltingly imploring the gods of the local folk religion – rugby – to select all of the Blue Bulls players for the national rugby team. While still wondering if the Cheetahs would not be a better option based on the 2005 season, I was struck by the sickeningly sweet smell of disinfectant almost visibly oozing from the army of portable chemical toilets barricading the northern side of the park. Full to bursting with the unconvincingly disguised inevitability of the gastric debauchery immediately in evidence upon rounding the malodorous bulkhead and entering the grounds, the toilets stole the show. My thought was forcibly shoved from rugby hymns to fecal allegory. If the medium is the message, what was the message of this dually indexical smell? If social categories emerge dynamically out of everyday practices, what do the toilets tell us of the scale, pattern and pace of cultural festival activities and social categories emerging from them? Alimentary dear Watson, alimentary – to solve this mystery I would, as a body in attendance, have to take my part in the process.
My project of participation in and investigation of the festive feeding frenzy for that day kicked off with a 38cm diameter crepe-style pancake bought at the point where the odors of the tail end of the alimentary canal mercifully yielded to the olfactory courtship of the gut. Waiting in the pancake queue, with the odors around me struggling for ascendancy, the vision and assembly-line production of the enormous starchy bulk I was about to task myself with eating joined the fray for representative ascendancy against the image of the disinfectant-oozing toilets with their visual and olfactory subterfuge exposed and failing a short walk to my right. At this location, an otherwise unremarkable space became the limen between the alpha and the omega of festival food. I found myself-at-Aardklop temporarily as that positioned at the olfactory, visual and imaginary mid point of the cultural life of ethnic food. Synchronicity had charged me with the responsibility of understanding this life, of understanding the contribution of culinary culture to the emergence and production of those social categories we call ethnic groups. It is this dynamic I imperfectly set out below.
Of course, for subterfuge to work it must not be recognized as subterfuge. Its intended audience must not recognize itself as the audience of a performance. This is the great failure of air freshener. Similarly, cultural diacritics such as foods to which particular meaning related to identity is attached are of course also performances – especially within the festival setting. And these performances also rely on their not being recognized as performances. Both require the suspension of disbelief for the realities they animate around their audiences to be experienced as actual rather than as the set of a make believe show, where ‘make’ denotes both coercion and collective activity.
However, when you find yourself at the end of a week of gross and sustained mass consumption, your attention captured by the failed subterfuge surrounding the peloton of pungent public privies, or at the head of a queue, your attention fixed by the magnitude of the pancake being waved in your direction, these performances give way to a gastro-chemically fuelled moment of truth.
The nakedness of the lunch becomes apparent at times and places such as this. The exaggeration, to the point of parody, of the cultural form you are going to begin ingesting and digesting, together with the proximity of its production to the natural form those processes will ultimately bestow upon it (and the failure of culture to contain it with chemicals and camouflage), sees the pancake flop towards earth – a warning against the dangers of exercising irresponsible ambition on the materials of saleable tradition.
A lesser pancake may perhaps have flown so close to the rays of the putrid, its cultural form sufficiently unremarkable to pass without powerful association. Such vulgar ambition however, forced an association; generated an image capable of circulating with what lay menacingly and immovably behind the ruptured toilet subterfuge. The wax attaching the material to the meaning to form the wings that hold the pancake aloft as a culturally meaningful object in the everyday could not withstand the strain resulting from the proximity of two such bulks. Under the gravity of such mass human excrement the new born parodic monster crashed earthwards, wrenching and dragging with it, in a narrowing gyre, the meaning that once transformed mere materiality into the nesting diacritics that make up any ‘date on the cultural calendar’.
The symbolic spaghettification that in this moment stripped the foodstuffs on sale of their diacritical status as they approached the metaphorical singularity and finality represented by the chemically treated stool stuffed parentheses enclosing the context of the festival grounds (an illuminating and reinforcing clause in a much larger ethnic utterance) laid bare a paradoxical and frightening dynamic. The volatile mixture of an unsatisfiable lack and an inescapable presence fuels a frenzied and entropic carnival of consumption. No matter how large the pancake, it cannot be transformed into a that final identity fixing diachronic, and no matter how cunning the camouflage, the pancakes final destination persistently tears away at the imaginary materiality of the fragile mind forged membrane of meaning containing the universe of shared identification.
To fill this lack, art festivals and giant pancakes emerge via a logic suggesting that collective celebration and consumption will suture the impossible category. The great paradox of this logic, momentarily brought to sensory consciousness in the terrible pancake queue, is that as the pancakes get larger and the consumerism more frenzied, the membrane it is in service of increasingly threatens to denature and disintegrate under the onslaught of the abject; the waste that increases in direct proportion to the frenzy of collectivity and rapidly exceeds the power of camouflage to contain. Human waste of all kinds; the barren spent desires of the threatened ethnic bodies they falsely promised to save, spill into overflowing bins and toilets. This process begun, the only way to stop the fetid from returning to finally collapse all meaning, and the category along with it, is to increase output – to hold back the disgusting excess by celebrating the impossibility of attaching to material that ends towards putrid excess any meaning capable of imbuing it and the rituals of its consumption with the power to confer stable identities free from the threat of that undesirable excess. So make bigger Pancakes, set up more toilets and attract more visitors – bring on Aardklop 2007
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Friday, August 04, 2006
Surviving Survival
What follows is a short piece I wrote for the local campus newspaper. A bit of fun really. The URL for the online version of the paper (in case anyone is interested is http://www.puk.ac.za/opencms/export/PUK/html/studentelewe/wapad/sitelib/Home/Wapad.html
The nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Tylor coined the term ‘survivals’ to designate elements of earlier social arrangements that no longer have a function in social life. Chuck Norris has, for example, lost his role as heroic symbol for the potency of the US and the righteousness of their global imperialism.
Chuck, however, lives on by showing that survivals are survivors too; by proving that the function of survivals is transformed rather than lost. Ironically mocked (proportionately to his fall from celebrity) as an (im)potent ‘law unto himself’, Chuck is transformed into a metonymical critique of the ‘cowboy’ US foreign policy he once served on screen. His nobleness thus restored in this inversion, Chuck now functions as a vehicle for expressing resistance to, and suspicion of, US imperialism.
But unlike Chuck, not all survivals are good, and without reinvented heroes like Chuck, these survival baddies keep popping up even after they have been voted out. Although the white tribe of Africa spoke a monosyllabic “yes” in1992, the ideas the apartheid ideologues nurtured have refused to shuffle embarrassedly away from the tribal council along with the portly old politicians in their Woolworths suits and surreal hats.
Leading this ‘survival sit-in’ is an idea of ‘culture’ – volk. In the reification and essentialism of this ‘culture’ concept, racism lives euphemistically on. Locally as popular – but by no means as positive – as ‘survival’ Chuck, ‘survival’ racism brings us informal racial segregation in PUK residences through the fallacious (not to be confused with the more salacious homonym) argument that people will be more comfortable living ‘with their own culture’. This is not the society that Chuck returned to fight for.
The jury is still out regarding Chuck’s successor. Two candidates are leading the race: the pinoccioesque Riaan Cruywagen – largely plastic from all the surgery it took to keep his steadily growing nose in check while he read the news during apartheid; and the rough and (ever)ready Steve Hofmeyer.
As metonymic of an Afrikaner masculinity that secured its past dominance through the ‘culture’ euphemism I refer to above, I hope that their succeeding Chuck as symbols of (im)potency rings in a critical rejection of the survivals from the apartheid order that should never have survived, in the same way as Chuck rang in the rejection of US imperialism.
The nineteenth century anthropologist Edward Tylor coined the term ‘survivals’ to designate elements of earlier social arrangements that no longer have a function in social life. Chuck Norris has, for example, lost his role as heroic symbol for the potency of the US and the righteousness of their global imperialism.
Chuck, however, lives on by showing that survivals are survivors too; by proving that the function of survivals is transformed rather than lost. Ironically mocked (proportionately to his fall from celebrity) as an (im)potent ‘law unto himself’, Chuck is transformed into a metonymical critique of the ‘cowboy’ US foreign policy he once served on screen. His nobleness thus restored in this inversion, Chuck now functions as a vehicle for expressing resistance to, and suspicion of, US imperialism.
But unlike Chuck, not all survivals are good, and without reinvented heroes like Chuck, these survival baddies keep popping up even after they have been voted out. Although the white tribe of Africa spoke a monosyllabic “yes” in1992, the ideas the apartheid ideologues nurtured have refused to shuffle embarrassedly away from the tribal council along with the portly old politicians in their Woolworths suits and surreal hats.
Leading this ‘survival sit-in’ is an idea of ‘culture’ – volk. In the reification and essentialism of this ‘culture’ concept, racism lives euphemistically on. Locally as popular – but by no means as positive – as ‘survival’ Chuck, ‘survival’ racism brings us informal racial segregation in PUK residences through the fallacious (not to be confused with the more salacious homonym) argument that people will be more comfortable living ‘with their own culture’. This is not the society that Chuck returned to fight for.
The jury is still out regarding Chuck’s successor. Two candidates are leading the race: the pinoccioesque Riaan Cruywagen – largely plastic from all the surgery it took to keep his steadily growing nose in check while he read the news during apartheid; and the rough and (ever)ready Steve Hofmeyer.
As metonymic of an Afrikaner masculinity that secured its past dominance through the ‘culture’ euphemism I refer to above, I hope that their succeeding Chuck as symbols of (im)potency rings in a critical rejection of the survivals from the apartheid order that should never have survived, in the same way as Chuck rang in the rejection of US imperialism.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Lies; Damn Lies; and Statistics (in the service of HIV/AIDS elites)
HIV/AIDS is serious business in South Africa. I mean this in every sense that it could possibly be ambiguous. People are dying, suffering and being orphaned, stigmatised and ostracised. Other people are becoming wealthy, developing careers and securing the subtle glow that goes with the activists’ position – a position that they vehemently insist is the moral high ground.
Any discussion of HIV/AIDS in this country is thus located in the virtual, contested and shifting topography of a landscape of ravaged lowlands, and competing mountaintop citadels of humanism and enlightenment. Atop the two most prominent peaks, each surrounded by loyal foothills sit the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the South African government. And from these positions, like the ‘worms’ of the classic computer game each aims and launches weapons from their arsenal in an attempt to blast the ‘moral’ out from under the other’s lofty position.
This split between the state and civil society in this case dates back to President Thabo Mbeki’s controversial statement that HIV does not cause AIDS, and the government’s perceived foot dragging with the provision of free antiretroviral treatment.
One of the weapons these ‘worms’ of the moral high ground have regularly resorted to is the much vaunted and feared media statistics bomb. More diffuse an attack than the satirical political cartoon; the statistics bomb is the equivalent of the cluster bomb in this campaign. And like the cluster bomb it is somewhat difficult to control, not all of the mini bombs designed to send ripples through the foothills are accounted for, and they don’t always all go off at the same time. But most significantly, many of the small bombs fall outside of the target area, so that the people populating the low lying areas of the HIV/AIDS landscape become collateral damage in what boils down to a high stakes game of ‘worms’.
How do they become collateral damage? And how, with all the munitions flying through the media, are we spectators of and participants in this war in/on HIV/AIDS supposed to make sense of the pandemic and our place in it? The obvious answer to the second question is to pick a side – if both so strongly claim their high ground is the moral one, democratic common sense would suggest that we should pick one. Evaluate each, and choose. But the fall out from the statistical bombs make this difficult if not impossible by way of the same mechanism that sees the citizens of the lowlands become collateral damage.
These bombs, like so many others, are launched with a rhetoric proclaiming the best and most noble of intentions. What Bush’s cluster bombs are to the spread of democracy and human rights, the statistical media bombs are to the spread of ‘awareness’. In a paradoxical twist, these munitions in the war in HIV/AIDS become the ‘intelligence’ basis for the ‘targeting’ of interventions in the war on HIV/AIDS. And the intelligence here is not dissimilar to that presented on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programme to the UN by Colin Powell – inaccurate, speculative, and motivated by interests other than the plainly stated – sustained and purposeful misinformation.
By way of an example let us examine some of these statistics. Earlier in the year, on the eighteenth of February at 2 o’clock, Stats SA (a statistical branch of the state) launched figures drawn from issued death certificates under the title ‘Mortality and causes of death in South Africa, 1997–2003’. These figures suggest that 448 308 South Africans died in 2001, 9 479 of them as a result of HIV/AIDS. This which boils down to an overall mortality rate of about 11/1000, if we accept the 2005 Central Intelligence Agency’s estimate of the South African Population at 44 344 136. These findings lead Stats SA to conclude that for the years 1997-2003 AIDS contributed to about 2% of total annual mortalities, and 3,8% of mortalities in 2001 for the age group 15-49.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) and TAC immediately condemned these figures in an attempt to minimise damage to their moral base, and the MRC has since counter-launched its own figures under the title ‘The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Adult Mortality in South Africa’, asserting that AIDS accounted for an amazing 40% of mortalities among people over the age of 15 in 2000. If we are to believe these figures, our annual mortality rate would drop to roughly 5/1000 were we to overcome HIV/AIDS – an unlikely figure given that Canada only managed an estimated death rate of 7,73/1000 in 2005 according to the CIA; this despite their lack of widespread poverty, unemployment, and the other mortal threats South Africans are subject to.
What are we to conclude from this enormous discrepancy between Stats SA’s improbable 3,8% and the MRC’s equally unbelievable 40%? I think this confirms my suspicion; these statistics are circulated as the machinery of HIV/AIDS terraforming projects. In bids to reform the landscape of the pandemic in ways which suit the two competing centres of the conflict, the shape and extent of the ravaged lowlands are being manipulated in attempts to attack and defend the mandates that give either side their seats on the high ground. We can’t choose between them, and nor can we be asked to believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But can we ignore them? I think not, because by association we would then be ignoring the inhabitants of the lowlands, where HIV/AIDS may or may not be the biggest problem. We would in effect be following the statistical munitions wizards in their rhetorical silencing of the many so that each side can continue to pretend that it represents their best interests, and hold on to their status as HIV/AIDS elites. I say pretend because if we never hear from those most affected, we have no way of evaluating the position of either side.
So what is my point? My point is that all this statistical mumbo jumbo isn’t actually helping anybody except those earning salaries and securing funding by positing themselves on the frontline in the war on AIDS. The statistics seem only useful in the role they play in the battle to see which organisations deserve the salaries and the funding and the plane tickets to global conferences. Speaking about HIV/AIDS in the garbled tongue of statistical projection means that only a select few are able to have their voices heard – namely the elites that employ the numbers alchemists and the researchers that fuel their sorcery.
I am suggesting that we collectively reclaim the landscape of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. If it is our best interests that provide the high ground, then we need to reclaim it. We need to insist upon a new way of talking about the pandemic: reject the stats as part of the problem; and reject the statistics producers as misinformation specialists. What did it cost to produce these statistics? I don’t know. And what did we learn from them? Only that we can trust neither them, nor those who produce them to give us an accurate picture of the scope of the problem or a useable statement as to the shape of a solution. Lets collectively turn off the game, retire the ‘worms’ and their statistics bombs, and come up with a new approach – like maybe letting people speak to each other.
Any discussion of HIV/AIDS in this country is thus located in the virtual, contested and shifting topography of a landscape of ravaged lowlands, and competing mountaintop citadels of humanism and enlightenment. Atop the two most prominent peaks, each surrounded by loyal foothills sit the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the South African government. And from these positions, like the ‘worms’ of the classic computer game each aims and launches weapons from their arsenal in an attempt to blast the ‘moral’ out from under the other’s lofty position.
This split between the state and civil society in this case dates back to President Thabo Mbeki’s controversial statement that HIV does not cause AIDS, and the government’s perceived foot dragging with the provision of free antiretroviral treatment.
One of the weapons these ‘worms’ of the moral high ground have regularly resorted to is the much vaunted and feared media statistics bomb. More diffuse an attack than the satirical political cartoon; the statistics bomb is the equivalent of the cluster bomb in this campaign. And like the cluster bomb it is somewhat difficult to control, not all of the mini bombs designed to send ripples through the foothills are accounted for, and they don’t always all go off at the same time. But most significantly, many of the small bombs fall outside of the target area, so that the people populating the low lying areas of the HIV/AIDS landscape become collateral damage in what boils down to a high stakes game of ‘worms’.
How do they become collateral damage? And how, with all the munitions flying through the media, are we spectators of and participants in this war in/on HIV/AIDS supposed to make sense of the pandemic and our place in it? The obvious answer to the second question is to pick a side – if both so strongly claim their high ground is the moral one, democratic common sense would suggest that we should pick one. Evaluate each, and choose. But the fall out from the statistical bombs make this difficult if not impossible by way of the same mechanism that sees the citizens of the lowlands become collateral damage.
These bombs, like so many others, are launched with a rhetoric proclaiming the best and most noble of intentions. What Bush’s cluster bombs are to the spread of democracy and human rights, the statistical media bombs are to the spread of ‘awareness’. In a paradoxical twist, these munitions in the war in HIV/AIDS become the ‘intelligence’ basis for the ‘targeting’ of interventions in the war on HIV/AIDS. And the intelligence here is not dissimilar to that presented on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons programme to the UN by Colin Powell – inaccurate, speculative, and motivated by interests other than the plainly stated – sustained and purposeful misinformation.
By way of an example let us examine some of these statistics. Earlier in the year, on the eighteenth of February at 2 o’clock, Stats SA (a statistical branch of the state) launched figures drawn from issued death certificates under the title ‘Mortality and causes of death in South Africa, 1997–2003’. These figures suggest that 448 308 South Africans died in 2001, 9 479 of them as a result of HIV/AIDS. This which boils down to an overall mortality rate of about 11/1000, if we accept the 2005 Central Intelligence Agency’s estimate of the South African Population at 44 344 136. These findings lead Stats SA to conclude that for the years 1997-2003 AIDS contributed to about 2% of total annual mortalities, and 3,8% of mortalities in 2001 for the age group 15-49.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) and TAC immediately condemned these figures in an attempt to minimise damage to their moral base, and the MRC has since counter-launched its own figures under the title ‘The Impact of HIV/AIDS on Adult Mortality in South Africa’, asserting that AIDS accounted for an amazing 40% of mortalities among people over the age of 15 in 2000. If we are to believe these figures, our annual mortality rate would drop to roughly 5/1000 were we to overcome HIV/AIDS – an unlikely figure given that Canada only managed an estimated death rate of 7,73/1000 in 2005 according to the CIA; this despite their lack of widespread poverty, unemployment, and the other mortal threats South Africans are subject to.
What are we to conclude from this enormous discrepancy between Stats SA’s improbable 3,8% and the MRC’s equally unbelievable 40%? I think this confirms my suspicion; these statistics are circulated as the machinery of HIV/AIDS terraforming projects. In bids to reform the landscape of the pandemic in ways which suit the two competing centres of the conflict, the shape and extent of the ravaged lowlands are being manipulated in attempts to attack and defend the mandates that give either side their seats on the high ground. We can’t choose between them, and nor can we be asked to believe that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But can we ignore them? I think not, because by association we would then be ignoring the inhabitants of the lowlands, where HIV/AIDS may or may not be the biggest problem. We would in effect be following the statistical munitions wizards in their rhetorical silencing of the many so that each side can continue to pretend that it represents their best interests, and hold on to their status as HIV/AIDS elites. I say pretend because if we never hear from those most affected, we have no way of evaluating the position of either side.
So what is my point? My point is that all this statistical mumbo jumbo isn’t actually helping anybody except those earning salaries and securing funding by positing themselves on the frontline in the war on AIDS. The statistics seem only useful in the role they play in the battle to see which organisations deserve the salaries and the funding and the plane tickets to global conferences. Speaking about HIV/AIDS in the garbled tongue of statistical projection means that only a select few are able to have their voices heard – namely the elites that employ the numbers alchemists and the researchers that fuel their sorcery.
I am suggesting that we collectively reclaim the landscape of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. If it is our best interests that provide the high ground, then we need to reclaim it. We need to insist upon a new way of talking about the pandemic: reject the stats as part of the problem; and reject the statistics producers as misinformation specialists. What did it cost to produce these statistics? I don’t know. And what did we learn from them? Only that we can trust neither them, nor those who produce them to give us an accurate picture of the scope of the problem or a useable statement as to the shape of a solution. Lets collectively turn off the game, retire the ‘worms’ and their statistics bombs, and come up with a new approach – like maybe letting people speak to each other.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Good Deaths and Bad Ones
Recently, the South African Mining magnate Brett Kebble was killed in what appeared to be a botched car hijacking according to police. He was shot in his luxury car while on the way to a dinner engagement and died on the scene. What happened next is quite intriguing.
Anthropologists working largely in the third world have often been interested in the different valuation of bodies – by bodies I mean corpses. Look at the international coverage of the Asian Tsunami last year. Tourists got far more coverage than locals, so much so that the problems seemed solved as soon as all the tourists made it safely back to their middle class lives back home. Some bodies are far more important that others. And we find this often quite disturbing and unfair. Take a look at what Brett Kebble’s father Roger had to say to the press:
Anthropologists working largely in the third world have often been interested in the different valuation of bodies – by bodies I mean corpses. Look at the international coverage of the Asian Tsunami last year. Tourists got far more coverage than locals, so much so that the problems seemed solved as soon as all the tourists made it safely back to their middle class lives back home. Some bodies are far more important that others. And we find this often quite disturbing and unfair. Take a look at what Brett Kebble’s father Roger had to say to the press:
We can't live in a society where these sorts of things happen at this kind of level. There is enough killing in the lower classes, let alone when you get into high-profile people.
His outrage here is interesting. By ‘these sorts of things’ he is referring to murder, and by ‘this sort of level’ he is referring to the super wealthy. But who is he referring to by the ‘we’ that begins the sentence. I think he may be referring to South Africans in general, but suspect he is probably talking about ‘high profile people’. And he is broadly implying that we can live in a society where ‘these sorts of things’ happen at a ‘lower’ level – among less ‘high profile’ people.
Social commentary from a man facing no less than twelve charges of fraud relating to share manipulation, for which he will presumably stand trial in October 2006. Charges against his co-accused, his son Brett have been dropped since the latter’s untimely death.
And even the mode of killing is something that becomes questionable to the still animated bodies on the same ‘kind of level’ as the deceased. While the police maintain that he died in a botched hijacking – a way in which many far less high profile South Africans have gone to the grave – Brett Kebble’s friends and family have repeatedly asserted that the murder must have been a planned assassination. A distinct possibility given his diamond dealings in Angola where he left some powerful former military intelligence business partners high and dry after what looks like some behind the scenes deals that squeezed them out of the picture. You can read more about this at Kebble, the gems and the general. Of course there is no link between these dealings and his death. And no evidence of any kind to contradict the police findings. What we are dealing with is a kind of myth making. A kind of accounting for contradictions that are untenable for the ‘high profile’ among us.
The point is that ‘these sorts of things’ must be the sorts of things that can only happen to the ‘high profile’ – assassination, the stuff of John Grisham. If this is true, then ‘we’ can continue to live in this society because it is a fair society in the eyes of the likes of Roger Kebble – death is proportional to ‘profile’. If however it is false, and the rich can die in equally banal acts of violence as the poor, then these fat cats have to accept being a part of broader society; they have to accept their substantial role as producers of the society in which the banality of daily violence has become so real. They become subject to their own creation; victims of a class system they both love and hate – subject to its logic – which seems to be a bitter pill to swallow. Incredibly bitter given the vast sums of money they spend on the security and the symbolic
material needed to distinguish themselves as separate from the ‘lower classes’. Like the Samurai of old, the deaths of the 'high profile' must be good deaths, even if it is only mythologically so. But unlike the Samurai, this is not about honour, it is about class.
Their deaths cannot be banal as death usually is. The ‘high profile’ is a kind of immortality. The death must have the quality of intrigue, so that the deceased and his associated can gain more profile, produce ever increasingly valued bodies.
These mythologies that lift the deaths of men like Brett Kebble out of the mire of banality and into the pages of John Grisham are a key ideological tool in the maintenance of the divide between the lower classes and the Brett Kebbles of the world. Death is no longer, it seems, the great equaliser. It has become yet another way in which the rich get richer.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Wild conjecture about the 2005 gulf coast hurricanes and Bush’s ‘finding god’
In the 2001 Mark Joffe Movie, The Man Who Sued God, Steve Myers (Billy Connolly) sues god after his property is struck by lightning and he is denied an insurance claim on the grounds that the destruction was the result of an 'act of god'. For the small man, the average Joe, a lawsuit is about as far as you can go to press you claims in the modern world, money permitting. But what about the big fish, the president of the most powerful nation in the world?
If there were more Steve Myers' living along the Gulf Coast in the USA I imagine there may be an enormous class action against god. How many insurance claims were rejected on the grounds that the two recent hurricanes were 'acts of god'. But I imagine there was enough good sentiment to see the victims of the hurricane recoup much of the cost of the damage - or at least I hope so.
My question here is not about the insurers however, it is about the hawks in the US government. George Bush junior is allegedly a born again Christian. In the born again vernacular, one would say he has 'found god'. My question is, were the hawkish Bush son to actually find god in a less abstract sense, would he bomb him (assuming god is a him).
If you think about it, were god to be found anywhere in a literal sense it would be the Near East - a reasonable hypothesis given the high number of 'reborns' from the USA that undertake pilgrimages to the area, of course the crusades, and the biblical notion of 'the promised land'. And then of course, god would probably be a dictator, and quite predictably a religious fundamentalist opposed to both the ideals of democracy (the bible is not littered with elections, in fact, the roman baddies of the new testament are the closest we get) and the free market. Gods country is beginning to look a bit like Iran, or Afghanistan (Iraq under Hussein was probably as hostile to the idea of an Islamic state as what Israel is). And then there are those damn hurricanes, those acts of god, which, were god to have a country, would count as the deliberate targeting of civilians, and far worse, the most precious kind of civilians - Americans. He would have to be dealt with as a terrorist.
In much the same way as Bush refused to look closely at US foreign policy after the September 11 attacks, I imagine he would not have looked into the local emergency response protocols, hurricane prediction systems and the like, he would have flown straight out to introduce democracy to the country of god - which would of course have involved bombing, an invasion, the unlawful detention of those defending god's country, and ultimately the appointment of executives from his fathers companies (Carlyle) into top government positions from which they could award the contracts to rebuild the heavenly infrastructure and education systems to their friends back home.
Those hurricanes got me thinking. It seems unlikely that George W has found god, because surely if he had, he would have bombed him to hell by now.
Dre
If there were more Steve Myers' living along the Gulf Coast in the USA I imagine there may be an enormous class action against god. How many insurance claims were rejected on the grounds that the two recent hurricanes were 'acts of god'. But I imagine there was enough good sentiment to see the victims of the hurricane recoup much of the cost of the damage - or at least I hope so.
My question here is not about the insurers however, it is about the hawks in the US government. George Bush junior is allegedly a born again Christian. In the born again vernacular, one would say he has 'found god'. My question is, were the hawkish Bush son to actually find god in a less abstract sense, would he bomb him (assuming god is a him).
If you think about it, were god to be found anywhere in a literal sense it would be the Near East - a reasonable hypothesis given the high number of 'reborns' from the USA that undertake pilgrimages to the area, of course the crusades, and the biblical notion of 'the promised land'. And then of course, god would probably be a dictator, and quite predictably a religious fundamentalist opposed to both the ideals of democracy (the bible is not littered with elections, in fact, the roman baddies of the new testament are the closest we get) and the free market. Gods country is beginning to look a bit like Iran, or Afghanistan (Iraq under Hussein was probably as hostile to the idea of an Islamic state as what Israel is). And then there are those damn hurricanes, those acts of god, which, were god to have a country, would count as the deliberate targeting of civilians, and far worse, the most precious kind of civilians - Americans. He would have to be dealt with as a terrorist.
In much the same way as Bush refused to look closely at US foreign policy after the September 11 attacks, I imagine he would not have looked into the local emergency response protocols, hurricane prediction systems and the like, he would have flown straight out to introduce democracy to the country of god - which would of course have involved bombing, an invasion, the unlawful detention of those defending god's country, and ultimately the appointment of executives from his fathers companies (Carlyle) into top government positions from which they could award the contracts to rebuild the heavenly infrastructure and education systems to their friends back home.
Those hurricanes got me thinking. It seems unlikely that George W has found god, because surely if he had, he would have bombed him to hell by now.
Dre
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Who is Tony Blair’s ‘Barbarian’?
In his speech on 16 July 2005 Tony Blair proclaimed in response to the terror attacks in London that the fight against terror is not a clash of civilizations because all ‘civilized’ people ‘Muslim or other’ reject terrorism. In his move away from a ‘clash of civilizations’ towards a clash between the ‘civilized’ and the ‘barbaric’, he has effected a change in the meaning of the word ‘civilized’. Civilization, like other words, has a history, the most recent chapter of which began with its reinvigoration during the Enlightenment. This history began in the Classical period and is derived from the Latin civitas describing people of the cities and distinguishing them from those people living in the rural areas (rus), and the barbarians beyond the borders of the empire (tribus).
During the Enlightenment the use of the word shifted away from a distinction between city and rural dwellers. It became synonymous with a particular understanding of ‘culture’. The cultured of society were the ‘refined’, those who attended the opera, the ballet, who had reading rooms in their houses and who ate cucumber sandwiches to the quiet sounds of Mozart. ‘Civilized’ came to describe the consumption patterns of these ‘cultured’ elites, and marked a distinction between them and the ‘coarse’ uncultured masses that laboured to keep ladies and gentlemen in their finery. The uncivilized thus became the poor and the colonial other for whom a special category was reserved – the ‘barbarian’.
As thinking around the idea of culture entered more fully into modernity with the establishment of academic disciplines aimed at its study, so its meaning changed. No longer restricted to the refinements associated with upper class existence, the term came to describe the sum of all things acquired by people as members of society. All people suddenly had culture, and all things were cultural, the beer hall as much as the ballet. Consequently, culture’s sister concept, civilization, which had so depended upon that earlier understanding of culture was also forced to change. It became a term to describe a certain level of attainment in a society, and became more than ever a marker and servant of distinction between the colonial powers and the subject colonies.
The ‘barbarian’ became distinguishable by lack: a lack of monumental architecture, a lack of writing, a lack of techno economic specialization. (These accusations could of course not be aimed at the Arab world, which had all of these markers of civilization long before the Europeans).
This brings us to the alleged clash of civilizations, one Muslim, one European. In this conception there is a struggle between two civilizations for the ascendancy of their mutually exclusive value systems, consumption patterns and vision of how the world ought to be. Blair’s rejection of this as an explanation for the recent terror attacks in London is good for the simple reason that it moves away from homogenizing all Muslims as fundamentalist or extremist, and undermines the association of Islam with terrorism. But what else does it do?
For one thing, it makes a kind of return to the Enlightenment understanding of the term. The ‘civilized’ are those that share common values and ways of doing things with the dominant global elite. Accompanying this is the necessary (because the term always needs an other) reintroduction of the ‘barbarian’. But the ‘barbarian’ is no longer the pre-industrial non-Christian colonial other, it is the terrorist. Much of the imagery surrounding this new breed of ‘barbarian’ is, however, continuous with its ancestor. It is evil, and a threat, but significantly, its evil stems from the threat it poses, not to the lives of the ‘civilized’, but to the ‘civilized’ life – to the patterns of consumption governed by the ‘values’ that give shape to the dominant and legitimate global order.
Civitas has come, through Blair’s words, to describe those within the walls, not of cities, but of the citadel of this global order, of the liberal democratic subjects of the neo-liberal capitalist global village. The ‘barbarians’ are those left on the other side of trade barriers and excluded from the circuits of international dialogue by the system of nation states and the increasing penetration into that system by both the powerful within it and the interests and agents of multi-national capital.
Did I say left on the outside? Let me rephrase – produced on the outside, this is more accurate. The current order was produced historically. Those included in and excluded from the sharing of its dividends was and is a crucial part of the production of those dividends which are, broadly, global political and economic power. To say the ‘barbarians’ were left out would presuppose that they are not, and never have been, a part of the system and its production.
For most of the twentieth century after the Second World War, the Cold War was the forum in which two major military and ideological centers struggled to secure these dividends and determine their distribution. This struggle found violent expression across the globe as the burgeoning US and Soviet empires tried to secure as much of the rapidly collapsing system of colonial rule as possible. Africa, South America and Asia lit up under the financial and military backing of the two super powers. So too did Afghanistan.
Just as with the first wave of colonialism, attempts by the superpowers to grab countries were met with resistance from local populations and both the US and the USSR became adept at marshalling local resistance against the expansionist attempts of the other. The US involvement in Afghanistan is, viewed in this light, central to understanding the history and origin of the new breed of ‘barbarian’ ushered onto the global stage by Tony Blair.
In order to oppose the Russian expansion into Afghanistan, the CIA seized upon, sharpened and raised to their own ends a particular understanding of the term Jihad. By converting Madressas into training grounds for Mujahadin to oppose the Russian forces; by training, arming and funding them; and by providing them with a leadership in the form of Usama Bin Laden, the US was able to run a successful opposition to the Russians and the evil empire of communism in a way similar to their opposition of communism in Angola.
Blair’s ‘barbarians’ were thus produced, given shape, direction and means in order to play a part in the triumph of capitalism over communism. They were the heroes of a war that helped to put in place and perpetuate the very neo-liberal economic, and liberal democratic political barriers on the wrong side of which they find themselves today.
Capitalism triumphed, and the monster that the CIA created in order to realize that victory ceased to be useful. However, it did not cease to be. Excluded from the international fora, a militant body trained armed and encouraged to fight for an Islamic state now find themselves the new enemy of their old allies in the ongoing battle over the distribution of global political and economic power.
A vision of the world (at least of the Middle East) sponsored by the US in their attempt to press their own cause against that of the soviet Union is now a ‘barbaric’ and ‘evil’ ideology. In the same way that the Soviet Union threatened to undermine the system of relationships upon which the patterns of consumption associated with ‘civilized’ life in the Western world rests, so too do the Mujahadin, now reinvented as Al Qaeda. The ‘barbarian’ cannot thus be thought of as just different from us mysteriously holding different values. The real question then, given that the ‘barbarian’ is in this case a very real product of the struggle to achieve the ‘civilised’ life, is whether or not ‘barbarism’ should be understood as the rejection of the ‘civilized’ life, or as that which is rejected by the ‘civilized’ world in order to propagate the globally unequal relations that ‘civilized’ life requires.
I personally favour the second option and as such am sure that terrorism, however horrifying will be with us until such time as the premises of ‘civilization’ are seriously questioned by those who most reap its rewards. The ‘barbarian’ is the shadow of global consumer lifestyles, but we can’t simply treat the problem as an undesirable side effect, as a kind of cancer that can be cut out. It is the price of ‘civilization’ and perhaps this is a product that is thus no longer worth buying.
By Andre Goodrich,
During the Enlightenment the use of the word shifted away from a distinction between city and rural dwellers. It became synonymous with a particular understanding of ‘culture’. The cultured of society were the ‘refined’, those who attended the opera, the ballet, who had reading rooms in their houses and who ate cucumber sandwiches to the quiet sounds of Mozart. ‘Civilized’ came to describe the consumption patterns of these ‘cultured’ elites, and marked a distinction between them and the ‘coarse’ uncultured masses that laboured to keep ladies and gentlemen in their finery. The uncivilized thus became the poor and the colonial other for whom a special category was reserved – the ‘barbarian’.
As thinking around the idea of culture entered more fully into modernity with the establishment of academic disciplines aimed at its study, so its meaning changed. No longer restricted to the refinements associated with upper class existence, the term came to describe the sum of all things acquired by people as members of society. All people suddenly had culture, and all things were cultural, the beer hall as much as the ballet. Consequently, culture’s sister concept, civilization, which had so depended upon that earlier understanding of culture was also forced to change. It became a term to describe a certain level of attainment in a society, and became more than ever a marker and servant of distinction between the colonial powers and the subject colonies.
The ‘barbarian’ became distinguishable by lack: a lack of monumental architecture, a lack of writing, a lack of techno economic specialization. (These accusations could of course not be aimed at the Arab world, which had all of these markers of civilization long before the Europeans).
This brings us to the alleged clash of civilizations, one Muslim, one European. In this conception there is a struggle between two civilizations for the ascendancy of their mutually exclusive value systems, consumption patterns and vision of how the world ought to be. Blair’s rejection of this as an explanation for the recent terror attacks in London is good for the simple reason that it moves away from homogenizing all Muslims as fundamentalist or extremist, and undermines the association of Islam with terrorism. But what else does it do?
For one thing, it makes a kind of return to the Enlightenment understanding of the term. The ‘civilized’ are those that share common values and ways of doing things with the dominant global elite. Accompanying this is the necessary (because the term always needs an other) reintroduction of the ‘barbarian’. But the ‘barbarian’ is no longer the pre-industrial non-Christian colonial other, it is the terrorist. Much of the imagery surrounding this new breed of ‘barbarian’ is, however, continuous with its ancestor. It is evil, and a threat, but significantly, its evil stems from the threat it poses, not to the lives of the ‘civilized’, but to the ‘civilized’ life – to the patterns of consumption governed by the ‘values’ that give shape to the dominant and legitimate global order.
Civitas has come, through Blair’s words, to describe those within the walls, not of cities, but of the citadel of this global order, of the liberal democratic subjects of the neo-liberal capitalist global village. The ‘barbarians’ are those left on the other side of trade barriers and excluded from the circuits of international dialogue by the system of nation states and the increasing penetration into that system by both the powerful within it and the interests and agents of multi-national capital.
Did I say left on the outside? Let me rephrase – produced on the outside, this is more accurate. The current order was produced historically. Those included in and excluded from the sharing of its dividends was and is a crucial part of the production of those dividends which are, broadly, global political and economic power. To say the ‘barbarians’ were left out would presuppose that they are not, and never have been, a part of the system and its production.
For most of the twentieth century after the Second World War, the Cold War was the forum in which two major military and ideological centers struggled to secure these dividends and determine their distribution. This struggle found violent expression across the globe as the burgeoning US and Soviet empires tried to secure as much of the rapidly collapsing system of colonial rule as possible. Africa, South America and Asia lit up under the financial and military backing of the two super powers. So too did Afghanistan.
Just as with the first wave of colonialism, attempts by the superpowers to grab countries were met with resistance from local populations and both the US and the USSR became adept at marshalling local resistance against the expansionist attempts of the other. The US involvement in Afghanistan is, viewed in this light, central to understanding the history and origin of the new breed of ‘barbarian’ ushered onto the global stage by Tony Blair.
In order to oppose the Russian expansion into Afghanistan, the CIA seized upon, sharpened and raised to their own ends a particular understanding of the term Jihad. By converting Madressas into training grounds for Mujahadin to oppose the Russian forces; by training, arming and funding them; and by providing them with a leadership in the form of Usama Bin Laden, the US was able to run a successful opposition to the Russians and the evil empire of communism in a way similar to their opposition of communism in Angola.
Blair’s ‘barbarians’ were thus produced, given shape, direction and means in order to play a part in the triumph of capitalism over communism. They were the heroes of a war that helped to put in place and perpetuate the very neo-liberal economic, and liberal democratic political barriers on the wrong side of which they find themselves today.
Capitalism triumphed, and the monster that the CIA created in order to realize that victory ceased to be useful. However, it did not cease to be. Excluded from the international fora, a militant body trained armed and encouraged to fight for an Islamic state now find themselves the new enemy of their old allies in the ongoing battle over the distribution of global political and economic power.
A vision of the world (at least of the Middle East) sponsored by the US in their attempt to press their own cause against that of the soviet Union is now a ‘barbaric’ and ‘evil’ ideology. In the same way that the Soviet Union threatened to undermine the system of relationships upon which the patterns of consumption associated with ‘civilized’ life in the Western world rests, so too do the Mujahadin, now reinvented as Al Qaeda. The ‘barbarian’ cannot thus be thought of as just different from us mysteriously holding different values. The real question then, given that the ‘barbarian’ is in this case a very real product of the struggle to achieve the ‘civilised’ life, is whether or not ‘barbarism’ should be understood as the rejection of the ‘civilized’ life, or as that which is rejected by the ‘civilized’ world in order to propagate the globally unequal relations that ‘civilized’ life requires.
I personally favour the second option and as such am sure that terrorism, however horrifying will be with us until such time as the premises of ‘civilization’ are seriously questioned by those who most reap its rewards. The ‘barbarian’ is the shadow of global consumer lifestyles, but we can’t simply treat the problem as an undesirable side effect, as a kind of cancer that can be cut out. It is the price of ‘civilization’ and perhaps this is a product that is thus no longer worth buying.
By Andre Goodrich,
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
