The following is something I wrote some time ago, as a comment on the then-prominent issue of violence against Indian students in Australia, and specifically in response to the various strategies deployed to play down the quantity of this violence, and to undermine any suggestions that racism, or race in any sense, was a significant factor in whatever violence there was. Is. Shortly after I wrote it, I sent it to Liz Thompson, to make sure that she was comfortable with the references to her, and also to make sure that I wasn’t saying anything ridiculous. Having received permission and reassurance on these fronts, I then forgot about it. But for what it is worth, here it is.

Many have claimed that Indian students are no more likely to be attacked than anyone else, or anyone else deemed to be in similar circumstances – claims often based on interpretation of statistics concerning police reports. Such statements may be in good faith.

Such statements, however, are almost certainly rubbish. No-one should be surprised that most people in Australia find it easy to believe such claims, minimizing violence which they do not suffer against people who have been socially almost invisible. The analogy I’ve sometimes used for the ability to not notice tens of thousands of people living, studying, working in taxis and 7-Elevens is with the legendary ability of yuppies in New York to not notice the homeless people they step over on the street, though this might be a little unfair.

In any case, these claims about the levels of violence seem to suggest that Indians are whining more than anyone else – as if there is an acceptable level of violence. And the claims of racial parity (that everyone gets attacked) also have the effect – and in many cases the intention – of seeming to reduce the evidence for ‘racism’ in this violence, at least in the somewhat simple understanding of ‘racism’ being invoked. (Claims about, or that it is, non-whites attacking Indians have similar effects, while claims about anti-Indian violence from Muslims – or people of Middle-Eastern appearance – help to absolve ‘Australians’ while shifting responsibility to those Islamic people (or those multicultural people, if you like). The convoluted ironies only increase when one considers that Indian students have sometimes experienced racism at least in part because anti-Islamic sentiments exist amongst ‘Australians’ unable to distinguish between, and indifferent to distinctions between, Muslims and any other brown foreigners they may encounter.)

But those statistics: can they really be trusted?

No.

Everyone who ever seriously considers crime statistics must always consider the questions of reporting. This is hardly a secret, and is one of the reasons, for example, why statistics about rape are notably difficult to interpret. The fact that no-one in the mainstream media appears to have even mentioned this issue in reporting such claims, and that police similarly take such statistics as automatically reflecting the realities people experience, is either evidence of stupidity or complicity in the kind of intentions I discuss above – intentions which of course dovetail with desires to protect Australia’s third biggest source of export income i.e. the many many billions of dollars generated by the ‘international education industry’.

But I’m not just suggesting that the claims about violence are questionable, that the claims that Indian students are no more subject to violence than anyone else, and that therefore the evidence for racial motivation is weak, are based on statistics which do not prove everything they are alleged to. I’m suggesting that the claims are rubbish.

I’m not just suggesting that the issues of levels of reporting is important; I’m stating that an enormous amount of violence has not been reported. I’m stating that the violence is not limited to but often from whites, including from suit-wearing types in the city, and I’m stating that it is often accompanied by racial abuse, or abuse of foreigners which is open to anyone enjoying legitimacy in Australia’s multicultural patriotism i.e. against those viewed as non-citizens. And I’m stating that some of the racism and some of the violence has been from police. And I’m stating that violence by police goes unreported not only because of the usual calculations of those so attacked concerning the usefulness and potential consequences of reporting police violence, but also because so many of the Indian students work as, say taxi drivers – work which entails regular, even constant encounters with police, mostly in the city. A fact which gives a different complexion to the idea of complaining about police violence.

And of course people on visas have additional, very strong reasons to wish to avoid problems with the law.

My evidence for all this is not statistical. It is somewhat impressionistic, and not even my impressions. It is largely based upon the constant involvement of my friend Liz Thompson, over a period of years, with a large number of Indian and other international students, and with a large number of South Asian taxi drivers – as much as any other whitey and probably more, involvement in their lives and their struggles, participation in their networks. Through this experience she has developed knowledge of the patterns of conflict and violence experienced by these students and workers.

And it is on this basis that I am truly confident in saying that the claims made about the meaning of those statistics by police and in the media are, in a word, crap.

So I walked out saying I was getting a pack of cigarettes and just never came back.

“The streets surrounding the university and across the city were largely quiet and empty on Thursday. Many workers in this Egyptian capital on the Nile had been told to stay home. The sidewalks were closed to ordinary people but lined by hundreds of soldiers – some dressed in black, others in white – who had been standing in place for hours before Mr Obama arrived.” The New York Times, 5 June 2009.

pseudo-event management
When it comes to what passes for US criticism of Israel, the gentlest of differences combined with a steady flow of staggeringly-unrestrained military and financial aid - aid not contingent on the Israeli state taking action in relation to that absurdly procrustean critique possible in US public discourse - is apparently “talking tough”.

When it comes to the Palestinian population being systematically squeezed into ever-smaller hells, with the use of precisely that aid, those guns, that money, ridiculous sanctimonious moralizing and crypto-racist representations of Palestinians as, for some reason, just given to immoral and criminal violence - well, that is ‘reaching out’, extending a hand in a gesture of friendship and respect, an historic opportunity, a moment for hope, “a bold overture to the Islamic world”, as Jeff Zelany and Alan Cowell put it in the New York Times article quoted above.

And the bizarre thing is that, in a way, it is indeed all those things, including a significant shift in the terms of the usual orwellian representations of kafkaesque realities. At the outer limits of permissible intervention, publicly noticing that Israel is continuing to aggressively colonize the territories and even saying that this should stop, in the context of this speech addressing ‘Muslims’, is indeed an event. Though the last Bush publicly made reference to the desirability of a “Palestinian state”, so the novelty shouldn’t be overstated.

That Obama said something not entirely meaningless is true even if his equation of Palestinian resistance and Islam is more-than-a-little reductive, acting as a ratification of the religious terms of struggle in a way probably more about the views and objectives of US geopoliticians than about the history of struggles against zionist settler-colonialism, or about the imperatives underlying that settler-colonialism. To suggest a parallel, in what was to become Australia, the British penal-colonizers and the later settler-colonizers didn’t destroy and displace Indigenous societies because of religious differences, however much the process was accompanied by declarations about the one true God or by efforts at conversion of ‘natives’ - rather, the great empire colonized because it wanted the land as territory for its projects, and eventually for a new state, integrated into imperial political-economy. It was the form and existence of these societies which centrally posed obstacles to the projects of the Europeans, not whatever religious beliefs those already here may have had. And so too it is in Palestine, historically and even now, when Islamist politics is stronger within Palestine than ever before. When prominent Israeli figures talk, as they often do, publicly and overtly, about ‘demographic’ problems, they are worried about the sheer existence of too many non-Jews, conceived as a threat to the current configuration of the state by their status as people living there, not because they are Muslims. It never mattered that the late George Habash came from a Christian Palestinian background, or that the PFLP (and the DFLP, whatever one may think of their current role) was not merely secular but largely atheist… I think I’ve made my point…

SBS right again: world continues to be amazing place.
But then no-one should have expected reality to make more than a cameo appearance in any speech by Obama. The words that come out of President Obama’s mouth are not bad; the words are awful. Obama’s speechwriters seem totally unembarrassed about bypassing reality, history, even sanity, and Obama himself seems equally relaxed. This has been true from his very first speech, an inauguration address which was either ignorant and reactionary or else almost astonishingly inarticulate.

Leaving aside those patriotic observations such as that “each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries” - Venezuela, those Arabs and Muslims - much of that first address was a long and ridiculous declaration of a War Against the Lazy, with long discussions about how hard everyone has to work - not just that much must be done, but specifically that people must work hard i.e. in reference to wage-labor.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path toward prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sanh.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

Now that is surrealpolitik. Slaves as patriots working hard to build the country because of their belief in America: that is how Obama discussed US history. Why not those sturdy, strong Native Americans whose belief in the greatness of this nation had them work so hard at being wiped out so that it could grow? Obama’s inauguration address was so ridiculous that I actually felt disappointment. (And by the way - they died in Khe Sanh to build their country?)

Now it would be years more of someone with no shame about talking nonsense about everything all the time. I honestly never believed he would seriously attempt to stop torture or people being kept in cages forever for no reason or the US repressive apparatuses assassinating people or keeping millions in US jails or running endless counter-insurgency wars and I’m thus pretty calm about the fact that, despite how the media like to portray things, he is acting exactly as I expect.

But I do care about the quality of what I read every day and see on the television, and I am actually disappointed that Obama is going to spend the next years spouting blather with no connection to any world beyond the imperatives of the shallowest propaganda. How annoying. Helping fuck over enormous populations is one thing; by firing pious greeting-card sentiments about it in all directions, he makes me one of his victims too.

And now there is this latest bit of business in Cairo. Obama’s speechwriters have a knack for fitting pleasant, even left-liberal phrases about tolerance and respect and non-violence into banal but friendly soundbites in support of almost anything. Take this little equation, from the speech at Al-Azhar University: “Just as Moslems do not fit a crude stereotype, America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire.” Stereotypes are bad, Sesame Street taught us the value of cooperation, why can’t we all just be friends? Obama is certainly friends with the current ruler of Egypt, “a stalwart ally” in his words, and not at all, despite some issues, a stereotype of corrupt, violent, repressive despotism maintained under an endless “state of emergency”, twenty-eight years and still running.

a quick note
The mention of the PFLP above is not just gratuitous, given the continuing international efforts to criminalize the group or any support for even the most innocuous of activities connected with it. The PFLP are simply terrorists. Under a 1996 law supported by Clinton, the US froze any assets declared to be those of the group, while making “material support” for the PFLP a criminal offense. In this day and age, who among us can honestly say that they have never wanted to hijack a plane, or put a bullet in a cabinet minister?

Denmark, for one, has followed suit - not with the plane hijacking but with the anti-PFLP criminalization - most notably by charging a half-dozen people in the group ‘Fighters + Lovers’ with financing terrorism by selling t-shirts over the net with PFLP logos, with the intention of donating a portion of the proceeds to humanitarian projects being organized by the group. The media has tended to report this last in inverted commas - “humanitarian projects” - but the extensive involvement in the PFLP in such projects, most notably healthcare in the territories, is hardly a secret. The hospitals staffed with doctors who are in the PFLP are hardly a trick to recruit terrorists; a largely stateless population created welfare, medical, political and military organizations, and the lifetimes of committed work performed by those involved do not simply amount to the development of ‘fronts’ just because some powers don’t like the politics of those involved.

If I am not mistaken the term “terror” became current in political terminology during the French Revolution. The revolutionaries began cutting off heads with the guillotine in order to instil fear. Thenceforward the word “terror” came to define the acts of revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, of fighters for freedom and oppressors. It all depends on who uses the term. It frequently happens that it is used by both sides in their mutual exchange of compliments.

The historical and linguistic origins of the political term “terror” prove that it cannot be applied to a revolutionary war of liberation. A revolution may give birth to what we call “terror”, as happened in France. Terror may at times be its herald, as happened in Russia. But the revolution itself is not terror, and terror is not the revolution. A revolution, or a revolutionary war, does not aim at instilling fear. Its object is to overthrow a regime and to set up a new regime in its place. In a revolutionary war both sides use force. Tyranny is armed. Otherwise it would be liquidated overnight. Fighters for freedom must arm; otherwise they would be crushed overnight. Certainly the use of force also wakens fear. Tyrannous rulers begin to fear for their positions, or their lives, or both. And consequently they try to sow fear among those they rule. But the instilling of fear is not an aim in itself. The sole aim on the one side is the overthrow of armed tyranny; on the other side it is the perpetuation of that tyranny.

Menachem Begin, The Revolt (revised edition), trans.Samuel Katz, Futura Publications, London, 1980, pp. 100-101.

The Australian legal system is founded upon torture. The threat and sometimes reality of suffering is deliberately used to generate fast confessions, guilty pleas, uncontested convictions. The practice is so routine, and those affected so marginalized if not despised, that it isn’t recognised for what it is, often even by those affected. In any parallel cases in which the threat or reality of a similar level of suffering were used to generate confessions, it would be expected that lawyers for the accused would ask that such evidence by ruled inadmissable. But not for these people, not for this threat, not for this suffering, and so not for these confessions. Not for this torture.

It is a truism that an enormous proportion of crime in Australia is ‘drug crime’, if not directly involving the production, sale or use of drugs, then property crime of impoverished addicts who need money usually for illegal and expensive drugs. It is a banality that impoverished junkies and other drug addicts make up a huge proportion of people in magistrates courts and in prison. And it is equally obvious that a significant proportion of people arrested for such crimes are addicts, overwhelmingly impoverished addicts, the lumpen proletariat - and that police know this.

Addicts who commit property crimes to get money for drugs, or because they have no money for food because they are broke because of the cost of regular drug use, live on short cycles. Money and drugs need to be regularly aquired, often more than once a day. People dealing with such people know this. And thus it is a uncontroversial police wisdom that any threat to detain such a person overnight, for example, is a threat that such a person will begin to physically withdraw in a police cell. They may be withdrawing already during arrest and interview, and thus feel an overwhelming desire to get out for reasons not connected to the charges per se. The ease with which such people can be effectively coerced to supply not only confessions but in some cases information used to get others is legendary.

Such people may be guilty of the particular offence, or at least some offence, but in any case will often confess to more-or-less whatever they are being accused of (within limits of course), in order to prevent the acute pain of withdrawal.

The Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as:

…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.

I literally cannot think of a way of interpreting this which doesn’t mean that the practices being described count as torture.

A more interesting question would be why this isn’t something obvious to all.

As part of Sarah’s birthday, as an expression of love, my love for her that is, I wrote her a tiny short story, which was going to be called “Provisional Title” until I changed my mind. That’s not a joke. By giving a story I give up intellectual property rights, of course, or anyway I guess, so by pasting it below I may be violating something, but here it is:

Desire and exhaustion

He was tired.

He had spent the last few years starring in such romantic comedies as You’re On Speakerphone (“See the sparks fly when they both stop taking their medication!”), Justine and Justin Get Twittered, and the romantic thriller I Know Where You Live and I’m Stealing Your Mail (“Revenge is a dish best served cold, and then left at the side of your plate.”). Desire, banter, happy endings. He had always wanted a job he could be proud to do badly. Despite which, his childhood desire to become the house detective in a seedy motel had receded into the mountainous border regions of his mind, hiding in the cave of an unwritten chapter of his imaginary autobiography entitled “Ineffective Detective”. His next movie was to be an animated adaptation of George the Bi-Polar Bear, an insanely popular, five-hundred page children’s book about one woman’s heroic struggle to turn off her smoke alarm. His role as the love interest had been added in development, along with the upbeat conclusion (she holds a chair so he can jab a broom up at her very high ceiling to push the button). His final line, leitmotif of his character’s asinine ‘wisdom’: “Everyone has dreams.” Cue kiss. Fade to black.

He felt like he’d been in a sugar coma for the last three years; his dread was hardly nameless. The key question was: why was there nothing instead of something? Before hitting minor-celebrity big time, he had turned down the lead role in Perseverance, the story of a man who refuses to give up on life and his dream of opening a truly first-class piercing salon, even after a freak accident leaves him a quadriplegic without sight, hearing, a sense of taste or smell, and unable to speak, feel above or below the neck, or blink. Instead he did the voice-over for a micro-budget documentary called NGO Wars, the tag-line for which was: “Give a man a net and he can fish; have your guns stolen by men and they can take over the means of production.”

He had raised his eyebrows and kept them raised.

He was tired, but also hungry. Where were his guns?

Not literally, of course. Literally, they were in a cabinet by the bedroom closet.

Toward a culture-industrial politics of spirit; or, the worst crap I’ve written for a long time…
In recent days I have been working, once again, on some fiction, primarily the stalled novel I began some time ago, provisionally labeled ‘authorities’. And I’ve been having discussions with Sarah about the results, most recently about a section of chapter 2.3, originally entitled “now for something completely the same…” but more recently headed “the secret of comedy” for reasons which only become totally clear, even if not particularly interesting, somewhat later in the text. In this sub-section we are introduced to the relationship between Juliet, an editor, and Nick, a bad stand-up comedian (and drug dealer) who lives in the flat above her. Under the most (negative) discussion is the following section:

Hanging in Nick’s living room was a framed poster, helvetica text superimposed over a photograph of Monica Lewinsky:

Remember JFK and Marilyn? Presidents get to sleep with whoever they want. We call it the Monroe Doctrine.
Bill Clinton

Juliet knew what the Monroe Doctrine was and she still thought the poster wasn’t funny. She liked Nick more than any dealer she had ever had and almost as much as any neighbor, but these were low bars to get over. On the other hand, having him upstairs was certainly convenient, in that he was almost always close by, he gave her credit, and he let her use in his living room, but he would then try out bits of his act: the poster’s text was from Nick’s first ever performance - “Australia - the sucky country” - which happened in the middle of the Kondratiev wave during which US political discourse was centered on interns and semen stains and so on.

The fake Clinton quote is supposed to be indented within the overall quote but I don’t know how to do this in this program,

Sarah feels, I believe, that the above is unambitious, low-brow maybe. That I illustrate a kind of conventionally ‘topical’ comedy which was saturating the period referred to but have nothing interesting to say or do with it. That, whether I am read as thinking the material is funny or thinking it is awful (or worse, funny because it is awful), I am not really working at anything other than the accuracy of my invocation of such phenomena and offering an implied authorial response which is just, I think she thinks, dull. The Clinton stuff in particular is obviously what she is critical of, like I have lowered myself to the level of David Letterman or worse. (These are not the only examples of less-than-great jokes which I attribute to Nick - in fact, as part of ‘my writing process’ I started keeping a file of bad jokes I thought of to have him be responsible for.)

So I agree, the text as it stands is not exactly Ponge or Blanchot, or Bataille, or even Pynchon, though it may not be that far from the less impressive bits of Mark Leyner I suppose.

In my responses to Sarah I didn’t argue the quality of this text but rather the legitimacy of trying to somehow reflect on intersections of (1) political tabloidism in journalism and (2) pop-culture topicality in that section of the culture industry called ‘comedy’, intersections which can even pass for commentary or satire in what I am tempted to call degraded political cultures, but which are certainly witless. In what I am producing I am in principle against making comedy out of people trying to be funny and failing, in the same way as I am against making comedy out of people being really really stupid, and I don’t think I am trying to do either of these things, even if I do want to illustrate that Nick is a (a) bad and (b) conformist would-be comedian, that he is aspiring to something specific and that that specific thing mostly succeeds in the improbable ie making us stupider.

I got the impression that Sarah didn’t think the project of reflecting the cretinizing relationship between (1) and (2) was worth doing (or, I guess, that I wasn’t going to be able to do it well enough to justify doing it - a judgment based in part on the above effort I suppose - that I will not be able to offer even the beginnings of what might count as a real critique). So now I feel I have to rethink not just the above but everything I wanted to do with that character’s minor career in stand-up. But I guess that fake Clinton quote is going to have to go. That ’sucky country’ thing too. What was I thinking?

If the above seems like a pretty uninteresting series of reflections - an excuse to put some kind of post on this neglected blog - you’re wrong: it is really an excuse, as if any was needed, to put a link to that text by Bernard Stiegler in the previous paragraph. Have a read.

To reassure the few people who care that I haven’t given up on this blog, and for a few other reasons, I thought I would write a few notes.

Keithie said the word “silly” a couple of days ago. It is as yet unclear how much she understands the concept. If she does start to use the word to refer to things which are in some way ’silly’, I think that this will be in some sense the most ‘abstract’ word she has added to her vocab - which is mostly made up of nouns used in one-word sentences, if they count as .sentences rather than simply exclamations: “doggie!”, “car!”, “hat!”. Oddly, she claps, points, laughs and often says “Yay!” almost every time she sees a train go by - we live next to the railway line - but doesn’t say “train!”, even though we do, and the same general procedures, it seems, have taught her other nouns, often with significantly less repetition and less obvious interest on her part. (However, the whole issue may be non-existent except insofar as it reflects the inaccuracy of my observation or memory, since Sarah disagrees, claiming that Keithie does say “train!” as the train goes by much more often than I suggest.)

Her first grammatically correct sentence, last Tuesday, 3 June: “You’re my mummy.” And literally thirty seconds ago she said her second, in response to my reading out the preceding to Sarah: “You’re my mum.”

Other than that no-longer-singular event, the most substantial sentences she manages are two words long: “my mummy”. Her most common word: “me”. By itself, repeated over and over, and somewhere between a command and a question - “me?” - abbreviating something like “is that for me?” or “will you give that to me?”, and usually accompanied by her holding out her hand. She learnt this directly from us, since we all used the expression “for me?” when we held our hands out to her, wanting her to give us something which she was holding.

Similarly, Keithie’s first grammatically-correct sentence was certainly not merely a statement of fact, though for her certain facts can be simply stated with pleasure. In this case, however, Keithie saying “You’re my mummy”, as she grabbed Sarah by the hand and did her best to drag Sarah along (something she also did in the sequel mentioned above i.e. just a minute ago), was connected to a general development of language as an attempt to direct, to act in the world and on the world, to take hold of what she wants and declare that it is hers, implicitly forming some relationship between ownership and command, possession and responsibility, statement and action, statement as action.

And she is working her way up to starring in her pre-school version of Oliver, since a minute ago she said the word “more” as a request for additional food.

anger mis-management
Over the last few weeks I had been quietly amassing notes for a blogpost provisionally entitled ‘empire, inland’. By last night I had two and a half thousand-odd words, some entire paragraphs but many of them just sketchy outlines of arguments or even just fragments, individual sentences, even phrases or subtitles I thought clever. But, while the argument wasn’t fully worked out and, as Sarah pointed out, some of it was not exactly running along unfamiliar lines, the point was that I was writing again and that this felt good.

Half an hour ago I tried to open the draft to continue this process. Somehow, it is gone.

I’ve lost drafts before, of course, sometimes much more substantial texts than this. But I haven’t been happy with much that I have written in the last five months or so and I was getting happy with this. Also, with my memory rapidly reaching a point I will home-diagnose as acquired brain injury, I need notes like never before. The idea of trying to reproduce something - even something only a few thousand words long (dense text though) - is not one I can contemplate as part of some abstract, unemotional exercise in reflection. It makes me wish I’d gone on that killing spree last year and saved myself the hassle of dealing with my having apparently accidentally erased something which admittedly probably feels better in what passes for memory as unrecoverable achievement than it would as a draft of something I need to decide whether to post or not. (Plus I just re-watched They Live, - which someone I know described in their Honours thesis as the story of someone who accidentally puts on a pair of Chomsky’s glasses - and the whole angry-blue-collar justified-paranoia justified-mass-murder narrative is now retrospectively interpolating me like a cop on a loudspeaker.)

I still don’t really know how it happened. It doesn’t feel like Freud made me do it i.e. like some parapractical expression of unconscious desire, and it isn’t an easy mistake to make, technically - and I haven’t been taking Stillnox or any other drug which makes me lose time. Or not that I remember. Rather, I’ve had too much time, insomnia lengthening yesterday to over twenty waking hours for example. Which is when it must have happened.

Off the top of my head, the draft contained:

(i) discussion of the category of the ‘event’, not in the sense of Badiou or anything/one like that, but in the straightforward sense of the quality given to the crude empirical facts of something like 9-11 which distinguishes it from any other mass murder or similar occurrence (almost wrote ‘event’) which fails to be, I don’t know, eventual? Not about the scale of direct consequences - non-events can have massive such geopolitical consequences without being such an event, without our lives continuing in an ever-lengthening shadow of endless aftermath.;

(ii) discussion of certain non-events I presented as exemplary in some detail - the Highway of Death in the 1991 Gulf War, and the subsequent blockade/sanctions of Iraq and associated mass death, and the blockade/sanctions/military assault on the people of Bougainville by the PNG and Australian governments being another. The latter, being less known, was given some historical detail, mainly to highlight the role of the Australian Labor Party in this deliberate policy of mass murder/generalised terrorism/counter-insurgency - years before the ALP’s role in the 1991 attack in Kuwait/Iraq and subsequent blockade/sanctions/deliberate death of hundreds of thousands.

But beyond the need to point out the ALP’s routine involvement in homicidal policy - what with them now being our leaders and all - the draft was supposed to develop into a reflection on mediation and representation and on everyday existence and the spectral geopolitics of reification. While my damaged brain may have difficulty reproducing much of that draft, if anything the process of rethinking and rewriting such a critique of representation and mediation should be at least as promising as it was last week when I began to think I was actually starting to think again.

As a final note, I’ve long planned a post about Sarah (she is in the last image, and not the baby), a woman I love so much it might seem almost insane to some, unless they know her well enough to realize how impressive she really is, has become, continues to become. (She is sitting next to me right now, using the other computer and wearing a vest which she made yesterday, an object which in itself is more stylish than everything I own or ever have owned - a fact which has no relation at all to anything else I say about her here.) I just don’t really respect many people. A long time ago now I started to recognize how much I respected her, and that respect has only grown since then, so much more than I would have ever imagined possible. Those who know me will, I think, realize that this is more of a compliment than it sounds - even if it sounds arrogant, misanthropic and loving.

Anyway, I still intend to write such a post one day.

I’ve had the strangest headache/migraine for the last twenty or so hours. For much of it I’ve wanted to scream maybe three seconds out of every fifteen, and it hasn’t gone away for more than forty-fove minutes at a time, except, I suppose, after I finally managed to get a few hours of sleep. It was there again when I woke up. The pain is on the outside edge of what I guess is my brain, about an inch forward of my right ear, and each time is very sharp and sudden - the other seconds, no pain at all, no dull ache, everything feels fine. I feel like one of those people at the start of House who display some weird symptom right before the camera drives right into their head and they collapse onto the ground. Next thing they’re somewhere between early Cronenberg and the kind of Oliver Sachs case study people base operas on.

Incidentally, I once had a doctor who was very obviously a junkie - I never saw it, but apparently it reached the point where he would shoot up in his office with an increasing proportion of his patients before his world fell totally apart. He wasn’t any kind of brilliant diagnostician, actually, but he would sell you an excellent script. Once his drug problem reached the point where he had to supplement his income by selling prescriptions and anything else he was empowered to provide or could get his hands on, junkies flocked into his place by the dozen, and soon enough undercovers were waiting outside his practice to snatch ‘patients’ and sweat them the five minutes it takes to get ninety-nine percent of drug addicts to roll, and then junkie-doctor was gone, no longer a free man and de-barred (quasi-inside jokes for anyone who knows what I’m talking about). When it comes to fucked-up doctors, junkies are like sharks, swarming in until there is nothing left to rip off the carcass, then moving on until another doctor miraculously screws their own life up enough to become useful, which means, of course, that desperate drug addicts become financially useful to the doctor as well. A generally quite short high-wire performance. Of course, most people who are doctors have a lot more in the way of nets to catch them than your average junkie likely to make use of such a decline and fall. This has been a community service announcement. I just want everyone to know I’m pro-family and anti-drug.

I have an appointment at the Carlton Clinic at 2:30. Meanwhile my head feels like it might rupture my skull.

Communist Headache was the name of a British ultra-left publication in the nineties, a couple of copies of which John Hutnyk sent me in 1995, and which are now lost along with almost everything else I had back then. I don’t remember much about Communist Headache except that it was a very cheaply made A4 mag and advertised a t-shirt which just had the words “I ♥ surplus value” on the front.

Actually, now that I think about it, the magazines and papers which John would send me from Britain back then had a pretty big influence on my politics and (hence) life: most obviously, Aufheben; the frequently excellent and now long gone Here & Now, which put out a nice supplement when Debord died; the now defunct Red Action, the ultra-left zine Proletarian Gob, the now-defunct but still much-despised Revolutionary Communist Party’s very glossy Living Marxism/LM magazine and their other, short-lived magazine focussed on workplace issues; even the Revolutionary Communist Group’s appallingly punctuated title Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! made it into his packages and my reading; the (then) Provisional Central Committee of the (still) Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker, often excellent materials from the unfortunately defunct Colin Roach Centre and from Anti-Fascist Action…and literally many many more.

Given the quality of far Left publications in Australia (almost uniformly awful) and the fact that the net, though existing, was hardly functioning as it is today, this was the only way I could really get access to the British far left, and a sense of a whole array of debates and ideas, and of efforts at engagement and organisation, of struggle and resistance.

What does it mean that so many of these groups and publications are often defunct (Here & Now, the Colin Roach Centre, AFA, Red Action) or have become even less impressive (the dominant tendencies in the RCP/Living Marxism morphing into Spiked! website and the Institute of Ideas, Red Action to the extent some members submerged themselves into the Independent Working Class Association)? Declines in certain forms of radicalisation and notions of the political, in some places amongst some people, are certainly not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly exciting an interesting things have happened this millenium. But it does reinforce the fact that anything truly exciting will probably come from somewhere outside of the familiar and expected, rather than emerge from traditional labour movement organisations or what most might consider the obvious ’social movements’.

Maybe this is more obvious in the broader Left in Britain, starting with the decline of the Labour Left and the ever-duller roles of trade unions and also of the student movements. The splits in and declines of both the Scottish Socialist Party and Respect - Left groups which had managed to achieve parliamentary representation - maybe reflect tendencies to exhaustion and incoherence of certain tendencies to Leftism: contradictions in social democratic nationalism and personality-based electoralism in the first instance, and parallel divergent socio-economic bases and political agendas in the case of Respect, where community leaders and business people, often the same people, seem to have found a political trajectory making even an opportunistic SWP politically too radical, as well as competitors for whatever lame-ass spoils people who play in that kind of politics want to seize their shares of…