Centrelink teaches the unemployed some important life lessons

The above is a screenshot of a skills assessment my housemate was completing for the Newstart (dole) payment. It’s supposed to help recipients learn the sorts of skills they need to be able to find gainful employment…while reinforcing some subliminal stereotypes while they’re at it…

The text reads:

“Chief’s tend to be high achievers and work towards achieving a promotion as soon as possible. For this reason they often accept extra responsibilities and strive for recognition of their abilities.

Businesses also need Indian’s. Indian’s are often the staff members who get things done and are comfortable with accepting direction.

They don’t  mind doing menial and repetitive tasks and prefer not to accept additional responsibilities. Businesses need Indian’s and they are an important component to business operations.”

I’m not sure which I’m more concerned with – that whoever wrote this didn’t think that there was something suss about telling us that Indians are the perfect convenience store employees…or that a skills assessment test for the unemployed doesn’t know how to use apostrophes.

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now

This is a recording of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room. He records himself speaking and then plays it back into that same room, recording that playback. He does that again and again, each time picking up the resonant frequencies of the room. The recited text describes the process itself:

“I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.”

As you listen to the recording, the speech becomes unintelligible and eventually all you are left with are the pure resonant harmonies of the room itself. Stay tuned for a performance of I am sitting in a room chez Pèche.

Seriously, look, I like Derrida but there’s lots of other people I like as well so stop thinking that I’m a one philosopher kind of guy, ‘cos I’m not, I’m totally a theory slut, so there

Ever since my girlfriend made a speech at my 21st in which she mentioned that I was particularly fond of Jacques, I’ve been copping a lot of shit about him. Lately it’s reached a kind of crescendo, and I feel as if I can barely walk out the door without being subjected to snide jokes about Continental philosophy. So, in an attempt to deflect attention from my love of deconstructionism, here’s a list of other nerdy things I enjoy which you can tease me about:

- Noise music

- Arsenal FC

- Human Rights

- Computer games

- Cycling

- End-of-the-world movies, especially ones with the scene where someone volunteers for the almost-certain-death-save-the-planet mission and then they ask who for anyone who will come with them to step forward and then everyone does, at the same time

- Coming-of-age films, especially ones revolving around high school sports teams in which a boy earns his father’s respect by almost winning the same trophy his father had won as a boy

- The internet, especially the badly spelt parts

- General low-brow procrastination which doesn’t revolve around ontology, epistemology, the limits of language, or the human condition

PS

I <3 JD 4 eva

D.F.W. is not my prophet

But he is my idol.

Infinite Jest sits on my bookshelf at eye-level when I’m sitting down at my desk. So whenever my mind wanders (which it often does) my eye is always caught by that dominating spine. Sometimes I succumb to temptation and open it up – half an hour later I’ll emerge from a tangle of words and images and thoughts and voices and characters and feel torn between putting the book down (and getting some food or studying or going out or you know, getting on with life) and re-entering the impossibly layered world of tennis academies and halfway houses.

But most of all it’s an addiction (it’s the only word for it) for D.F.W.’s voice, which hovers above and in and underneath the myriad of voices who speak in the novel. And not because he’s slamming you over the head with some Authorial Intention – quite the opposite. He achieves that incredible feat that only a handful of authors have ever been able to pull off – he creates achingly real, human characters who exist autonomously of their creator – and yet every sentence is imbued with his intelligence, humour and compassion.

At the end of the day, reading Infinite Jest isn’t nearly as intellectually exhausting (which it is, very much so) as emotionally exhausting. In an interview, D.F.W. once said that he thought that what set fiction apart from other art forms was that at its greatest, it managed to make you feel like you were communicating one on one with some other human being, some true thing was passing between you. He said that it was this illusion which alleviates the terrible loneliness of living, and reading his novel I felt so strongly that there was this guy in America talking to me, telling me that life is complex and wonderful and worth living.

That D.F.W. hung himself little over a year ago is therefore doubly tragic – the world lost a wonderful, kindhearted human being, and now when I read his work, I can’t help but wonder if I heard him right the first time after all.

Some brief words on Zizek’s ‘Violence’ – a piece for Chalk Press

[N.B. The following is something I wrote for Chalk Press, a forthcoming publication put out by a bunch of totally rad (as in cool, but also as in radical) people from Melbourne town. Email them at chalkpress@gmail.com for more info if you're interested, and keep your eyes peeled for it!]

Violence is a collection of six essays, each a meditation on the ostensibly non-violent systems which allow for real world violence. Zizek is particularly critical of what he calls the “liberal communists” – the “good people who worry”. The arch-liberal communist is Bill Gates, for whom there is no single working class – instead there are just specific problems to be solved. Gates is the single greatest benefactor in human history but, like Richie Rich’s philanthropic father, all his good intentions belie the fact that his enormous wealth is founded upon a global system which entrenches oppression.

Similarly, the First World doles out help to the developing world in the form of aid and credits and in doing so, is able to avoid the key issue – that it is the very global financial system which generates First World wealth which is responsible for the misery and suffering of the developing countries. 

The challenge for us is to articulate this critique in the context of contemporary politics, which Zizek describes as “post-political bio-politics” – the (supposedly) non-ideological expert administration of the security and welfare of human lives. The point of life becomes life itself – nothing more. Giorgio Agamben described this state of being as homo sacer – the life that can be killed but not sacrificed – because there is no longer any ideology to be sacrificed to.

What better way to characterize our current experience of university than the non-ideological expert administration of our education (read: The Future of the Nation)? The question has been asked, is the university still worth fighting for? In recent years, it certainly doesn’t seem so. It’s a common complaint amongst lefty students that our elections seem to increasingly occupy a kind of post-ideological dead space populated by vacuous promises for more beer and less protests. However, as has been pointed out, are student campaigns based around ‘access’ any better?

Zizek uses the Paris riots of 2005 as an example of an explosion of violence that had no purpose, no utopian vision. The protestors made no coherent demands.  This was not, he argues, a result of the impotence or stupidity of the protestors but rather, as Frederic Jameson put it, their “inability to locate the experience of their situation within a meaningful whole.” Demands based around access fall into the same category because they do not encompass a wider critique of the university as an institution. Because demands for access are based on the same ideology as that which sustains the university’s inequality (namely, liberal democracy), they are not an ideological or systemic critique but instead fall into the same post-ideological landscape as demands for an entirely service based student union.

Zizek also has an interesting explanation for continuing social injustice.  The just society, as articulated by John Rawls, is one in which social inequalities are not the result of inherited hierarchies but instead natural inequalities – that is, our laws should be judged by how they help people with the very least, on the bottom rung of the ladder. However, such a society would only lead to resentment – my low social status would be totally justified, and I would be denied the pleasure of blaming an unjust social system for my failures.

Perhaps that is why students persist to make their way through a system that is so palpably unjust? Because at least this way, when they eke out their lives in unrewarding jobs they will have something to blame.

Alternatively, perhaps student apathy stems from the basic sense of well-being that comes from knowing that, at least, we’re free to choose. Zizek argues the converse: that the concept of forced choice is at the heart of liberal democracy. You are free to choose so long as you make the right choice. Put another way, at university we are free to choose a product, so long as we choose to choose. Demanding a better product is still affirming that choice to choose. To not choose at all, to question how our university educations are implicated in global systems of control (of information, people, capital) is not a choice that is open to us. After all, when we vote, our primary vote is cast not for our preferred candidate but for the very system of voting in the first place.

But just because you have to choose doesn’t make that choice meaningless. Instead, it serves a crucial symbolic function – the empty gesture which underpins the social order. Even though you must love your country, it is also vitally important that that love comes from your own free will.

Ultimately, Zizek’s point is a difficult one to come to terms with.  He debunks our illusion of free choice which valorizes the liberal subject who is supposedly a free autonomous agent. By doing so, he strips us of our political agency (at least as we commonly understand it), but his point is that an attachment to the illusion of freedom distracts us from the systemic and institutional conditions for injustice. To campaign for concession tickets for international students is to ignore Brecht’s question, “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” The mistreatment of international students has its roots in the very structure of the system that brings them to Australia in the first place – and concession cards will not only fail to change that system but can distract us from the bigger task at hand.

But can we just stop campaigning for concession cards and smaller class sizes? After all, it’s one thing to say, forget about all that, concentrate on the bigger picture. But to do so would require a leap of faith beyond the post-ideological landscape in which we have learnt and cultivated our politics. As Orwell said:

“It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinctions[…]I have got to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person.”

Scrabble at 4am

Having just wiled away the wee hours of the morning playing scrabble, we retired to our rooms and laid down on our beds and stared saggy eyed at our computers. The house was so quiet that we could hear the gentle hum of our laptops, and our typing seemed thunderous.

Supper had been at the European, gnocchi of some sort with a nice pilsner. It’s strange sitting in a bar/restaurant around midnight, being served by very attentive staff.

Before supper was a rambling, chaotic, tardy, intimate sound gig. There were more people on stage than in the audience. But as the set progressed, individual performers would rest their instruments and sit down with the punters, until we were all watching and applauding an empty stage.

Dinner was nachos in front of trashy television. Intellectual and pseudo-intellectual conversation filled the ad breaks.

We’re floating gliding sailing from meal to meal, bubble-wrapped and carefully packaged, sealed and hand-delivered, signed for, safe and mollycoddled. We play Scrabble at 4am because we can.

Another Musing on Racism Prompted by Various Responses to My Last One

It seems slightly ludicrous to me that racism has become the topic of the day. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t feel marked out by racial difference, and I think I grew up with a strong sense of just how horrible racist humour is for the person at the butt of the joke.

And no, it’s not as simple as being ‘offended’. I take offence to racist jokes when I see them on stage or on the television, or when it’s yelled out by a drunken stranger outside the pub. That sort of thing is easy – sure, it makes me angry, sad and pissed off but I can come to terms with it – those people are just racist fuckheads, they exist, fine, move on. But what is much, much harder is the racist humour practiced by friends, towards me, in their capacity as a friend.

How do you want me to respond? It’s a question I grapple with from day to day. I know from experience that the appropriate response, the response that will garner the most social and cultural capital, is to laugh along. Better yet, I should take the joke further – I should tell another racist joke. My role here is simple – to validate my friends’ jokes, to assuage any guilt they might have. It’s the most horrible colonialist logic at play here – it is not enough for you to assert your difference from the Other (your ‘ethnic’ friend) but you need the Other to reinforce that difference, to constantly carry that difference within them as a part of their identity.

Christopher, in a response to an earlier post, wrote that race is a construct – that “each of us chooses to construct, and identify with, our own idea of our race differently”. This patently ignores the position that an ‘ethnic’ person is put in by so-called ‘friendly’ racist jokes. In the moment that a friend tells me a racist joke about Asians, I am confronted by the choice to either a) laugh along, validate their joke, acknowledge my difference (my Asian-ness) as a laughing matter; or b) kick up a fuss, point out their racism and thereby make them uncomfortable and resentful, and inevitably confirm my difference as some sort of taboo, like a terrible stain or defect that we don’t mention in polite society.

When you separate out ‘artistic practice’ from everyday conversation, as I think Zoe and Christopher were hinting at in their responses to my previous post, then we are making a false distinction between the public and private spheres. We would effectively be removing political responsibility from our ‘private actions’, casting our conversations with friends as apolitical. What that means is that I am effectively barred from responding to friends’ racial humour on a political level – instead, my only recourse is to option B, which is effectively an appeal to the personal – ‘Please don’t tell that racist joke because it offends my hypersensitive sensiblities’. It means that my friends are able to channel their racism into the ‘private’ sphere, leaving their public personas unbesmirched so that they can pontificate from the moral high ground when ‘bogans’ have the gall to enact the violent racism that they themselves perpetuate in their everyday lives. The public/private division means that the privileged, white middle-class can have their cake and eat it too – they can publicly denounce politicians, art and popular culture as racist (and thereby confirming their own anti-racism) while privately enjoying all the psychological and social benefits of the colonialist in private, as they guffaw over some joke about my squinty eyes and yellow skin.

And it’s not a simple matter of race ‘education’, and nor is the problem ’self-ghettoisation’, as suggested by Nicholas. The idea of integration, or multiculturalism as panacea for the ills of racism ignores the centuries of colonialism which have exacted a heavy toll on our collective psyches. Envy, self-loathing, wanting to be white, or regressing to some simplified idea of originary ethnicity – these are all part and parcel of growing up ‘ethnic’ in a largely homogenous society. I found the most interesting part of the panel at TiNA was when Bhakthi said that she tries not to write from a position of ethnicity. The phrase ‘ethnic lit’ is often used to denigrate and pigeon-hole fiction much in the way ‘queer lit’ is used to devalue a wide-ranging work of art until it can only be seen to be saying one thing. The worst thing about racist jokes told by friends is that it does the same thing – it simplifies my complexity down to a one word definition. And it is only natural that I should then want to escape that definition – thus bringing about a never-ending cycle of running away, and then towards, and away again (and so on) from my ethnicity, that thing that both defines my value, and takes it away.

A National Charter of Human Rights?

The recent release of the report by the National Human Rights Consultation (NHRC) has confirmed what Costas Douzinas referred to as the triumph of human rights as ideology. The consultation received over 35,000 submissions, the most ever for a national consultation. Of those submissions, the overwhelming majority were in favour of a national charter of human rights. The evidence seems to point to the fact that human rights, and in particular, a human rights charter are widely (one is tempted to say, almost universally) supported by Australians.

However, it is precisely this whole-hearted, bipartisan acceptance of human rights that we must be wary of. There is the tendency to take human rights’ claim to universality at face value, however, as Ratna Kapur has pointed out, human rights is a site of power – it therefore matters who is exercising this power. While human rights ostensibly represents the language of the oppressed, a national charter is not necessarily so straight forward. No matter how popular a charter may be amongst the people of Australia, the charter will and must be implemented by those in power.

Looking at the issue through a postcolonial lens, questions are raised about the extent to which a national human rights charter could be pluralistic. Any federal enshrinement of human rights would inevitably privilege particular values over others. Our concern here must be to ensure that any national charter would not further entrench current patterns of cultural dominance in Australia – namely, any national charter should strive to not privilege the values of Judeo-Christian Anglo-celtic white Australia.

Generally speaking, the likely primacy that would be given to civil and political rights over economic and social rights in any proposed charter reflects a Western liberal tradition. In the NHRC’s recommendations, it was recommended that while civil and political rights should be justiciable, economic and social rights should not lead to a cause of action. If we do choose to place economic and social rights on a second tier, there is the danger that we will fail to adequately deal with Australia’s colonial past. Civil and political rights can serve to mask systemic inequalities – formal equality with regards to the right to silence, for example, are not sufficient where particular social groups don’t have the required education to understand that right, or who live in economic and social conditions that foster violence and crime.

More worrying is that fact that a national charter of human rights’ claim to universality, at first glance so appealing, can actually prove to be imperialistic in practice. Human rights, at least as framed on an international level in instruments such as the UDHR, are fundamentally individualistic. This emphasis on the individual stems from the liberal tradition, and presupposes an individual who is free to make his or her own decisions. This individual is therefore seen as acting outside of culture (because if we act in a certain way only because of a cultural norm, then we are supposedly not acting of our own free will). Culture is therefore seen as stagnant, inextricably linked to the nationalism of which the drafters of the UDHR were so wary, given that the horrors of WWII were still fresh in their minds. Therefore, when Article 27 of the UDHR states that everyone has the right to participate in communities and cultural life, the right being protected is actually still a very individual one. We are free to participate in culture as individuals – which makes sense within a secular Western culture but which is incompatible with cultures where the act of submitting to cultural norms is a fundamental part of that culture itself. Therefore, the liberal imperative that a Muslim woman may take the veil only if it is an expression of her own free will and not that of her husband’s misses the point. Culturally speaking, the veil is and cannot be an expression of her free will – it is the signifier of her cultural submission – and to ask her to wear it for any other reason is to strip the act of any symbolic significance.

Despite these criticisms and concerns, I do not believe that a national charter of human rights would be a negative step. A charter would still achieve a number of very important goals. Apart from the obvious benefits of a charter which created actionable rights, a charter would also help us to develop a language of shaming. While not always credible amongst the cynics and practitioners of realpolitk, moral persuasion has a very important role to play in shaping public discussion. Many of the issues facing Australians today, in particular the rights and well-being of Indigenous Australians, can only be resolved through a shared, national discourse. A national charter of human rights could be seen as setting the agenda for that national discourse.

In addition, there is the danger that the international human rights regime can lead to a normalisation of the idea of the West as free from human rights abuses. If we look at Australian media coverage, it would be quite understandable to come to the conclusion that countries like China are the only human rights abusers. In fact, in class there was definitely the sense that students found it easier to identify human rights issues abroad than at home. We only need to look at Australian reactions to accusations of racism (in the wake of the attacks on Indian students and the Hey Hey It’s Saturday blackface skit) to see that we are desperately in need of a shared language which makes it ok to publicly discuss Australia’s human rights failings without being branded a traitor.

Nowhere has this need for a shared language of shaming been more apparent than in the debate of the Northern Territory Intervention. In an essay on the topic, Marcia Langton proposed the following question: “Are there really Aboriginal people so morally confused that they see the rape of babies as normal and not warranting intervention?” Like many other commentators, Langton’s language leaves no room for discussion. Later in the article, she says that it is an “indulgent fantasy to require ‘consultation’ before intervening to prevent crimes being committed.” This attitude gets to the very heart of why a national charter of human rights, properly debated and supported by the Australian people, is so important. Without it, politicians and commentators are able to use rights-based rhetoric (the ‘sacred’ rights of the children) to implement programs at the expense of other rights (the rights of Indigenous people to self-determination, and an active role in the political process).

That said, we have some way to go before a charter could be truly pluralistic. Perhaps the best way forward is to take human rights’ claim to universality with a grain of salt – and rather than seeing the charter as a final, definitive expression of our morality we should see it as a platform for discussion and dialogue.

Tom is Dead Review

Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that to continue to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. That is, in the face of such unspeakable grief we are better off saying nothing. In stark contrast to that, today we have a society nourished by Oprah and Dr. Phil, whose first commandment is share.  We now tend to think of grief as something to be worked through. What we want (or what we’re told we want) is closure.

Marie Darrieussecq’s novel falls somewhere in between these two approaches to grief. It is narrated by a mother whose four year old son, the eponymous Tom, dies just weeks after the French-Canadian family moves to Sydney. The mother’s loss is absolute – ten years after the death, she is still haunted by her son’s “spectral voice”.

“Still?” That is the question that her sister-in-law asks her, and it reverberates throughout the book. The nameless mother struggles against this idea of a healthy period of mourning, after which we are supposed to ‘move on’, to forget. She asks herself, if I allow myself to forget Tom, then what will be left of him? Such an attitude is characterized as ‘pathological grieving’ by the psychiatrists, who turn to stress evaluation scales measured in life change units to quantify grief.

And indeed, the mother’s behaviour does veer towards what we might ordinarily think of as unhinged. She loses the ability to speak for awhile, and places hidden recorders around the house to capture what she is sure are the sounds of Tom’s continued existence. She mistakes her living children for her dead one, and seems indifferent to the further disintegration of her family, “[b]etween the four of us, we keep a body functioning: Stuart speaks, Stella eats, I clean, and Vince tries to live.” But it is a testament to the power of Darrieussecq’s writing that the mother never comes across as hysterical. Instead, there is something tragically admirable in her refusal (or is it an inability?) to forget death.

The prose is sparse and brittle – our narrator is not one to waste words. The texture of the novel is flat, monotone, unrelenting. Death is not an absence here so much as a presence without substance. Ghosts, yes, but not of the transparent, spooky kind. Instead, Darrieussecq’s narrator is haunted by “images in the future perfect.” As she watches her surviving son Vince surfing, her mind can’t help but turn to the Tom-that-might-have-been. Grief is surreal because it is so preoccupied with the would have – what Tom would have looked like at fifteen, what he would have sounded like after his voice broke.

And of course, she is haunted not only by the future perfect, but the hypothetical if. The overwhelming guilt that washes through the writing (what if she hadn’t named him Tom? If they hadn’t moved to Sydney?) is only matched by the sharp, glowing fury that is a constant undercurrent throughout the novel. The mother rages against us ‘innocents’ who haven’t been so closely touched by death, by those friends and neighbours who look at her grief as abnormal, something to be avoided. She wishes she could “drag Tom’s corpse before them.”

In doing so, she and the author both explicitly ask us what role literature has to play in mourning. Of Proust, she is dismissive because the mourning in Remembrance of Things Past is over ‘nothing’. Instead, she praises Charlotte Delbo, a Holocaust survivor who set about writing down everything she could remember about every single one of her slain comrades. So she rejects both the silence of Adorno and the kitsch catharsis of the modern psychiatrists, because both are just ways of forgetting. There is more than a hint of French existentialism at work here – indeed, the title and opening line of the novel, “Tom is Dead”, echoes Darrieussecq’s compatriot, Albert Camus, who began The Outsider with the line, “Today, Mother died.”

Darrieussecq shares with the existentialists a commitment to examining our mortality without flinching. In this book that is so closely tied to death she also offers us a poignant example of how to live honestly in the aftermath of death. The injustice, and tragedy, in the end, was that “Tom died illiterate, ignorant of death. A few questions, yes, and we gave him fairytales. That was it, his preparation for death.” Tom is Dead is Marie Darrieussecq’s tenth novel, and she deserves to have a much wider audience outside of her native France, for she is a writer who is brave enough to give us more than fairytales.

Cycling, Cramps and Cadence

I rode from East Melbourne to the Mount today. Thankfully, Spring decided to show up, so it was a beautiful ride along the Yarra and Gardiner’s Creek. Usually I take a mostly road route, but today I went most of the way along a series of bike paths. It made a lot of difference – I was able to really get into a rhythm and tagged along to the back of a couple of good riders who really pulled me along at a nice pace.

One of the zines I brought back from TINA was Ianto Ware’s ‘21 Days in July: The Physics and Metaphysics of Cycling’. In it, Dr. Ware talks about the state of Zen the good rider can get into when she gets her cadence right. If your cadence is too high, it’ll feel like you’re over-revving, turning the pedals a lot for not much gain. If your cadence is too low, you’ll be pushing yourself out of the saddle, and tiring yourself in the process. But if your cadence is just right, you’ll get into that mystical state where every pedal stroke seems to keep you gliding along. It’s when riding feels effortless that you really start to become aware of what you’re riding through. Today, it was really lovely to ride through the parks and past cricket ovals, with the sun bathing everything without heating me up to much.

I did cramp up about 200 metres from home, which was pretty annoying. I had to actually get off and walk for a bit while my calves recovered. They’re actually still quite sore as I write.

Anyhoo, it probably won’t be long before I’m wearing full body lycra and riding to my corporate office where I’ll roll around in a pool full of money while laughing maniacally. It’s a slippery slippery slope. And yes, Cat, this blog is self-indulgent. All blogs are, and most writing is. What are you gunna do about, huh?