Against Colonial Rubbishing

As my facebook friends know, I take my status updates seriously. This does not mean that I only treat serious topics, or that I take myself overly seriously. Indeed I can be very frivolous and I always maintain a healthy cynicism towards whichever way I happen to see myself favorably on any given day. What I mean by taking my facebook entries seriously is that I put all (or at least a lot) of myself into them: in them, I am rational and emotional, intellectual and political, public and personal, theoretical and empirical and a lot more. I am saying this because I am beginning this piece by reflecting on a couple of status updates I have made in the last few months. So, I want readers, especially those who are quickly inclined to do so, to at least wait until I finish before thinking that I am conceited for thinking that my facebook entries are worthy of any serious reflection at all. What led me to reflect on these entries is a realization that, despite the different subject matter between at least some of them, they have been driven by very similar sentiments and emotions: disgust, rage, anger, pain and sadness. I want to reflect on the source of this similarity. The first entry is dated March 9, 2013 when I was invited to give a keynote at a conference held at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. I wrote it after I had been given a tour around Ramallah and Jerusalem the day before the conference. It went this way: I did tell the organiser of this conference that I don't feel I should be giving a keynote on 'Palestine between dependence and independence', that I am hardly the most empirically knowledgeable person in this field. But he insisted. 'Everyone says you make people think outside the box. That's what we need' he said. I was flattered. But one day of experiencing the 'settlements' and the wall has already so fundamentally disturbed me. I've read all that can be read about the Wall and the settlements and I was still fundamentally shocked... How is this possible today? It is like a colonialism running amok with power. Walling people as they please, mistreating them as they please, building colonies high up on the hills and literally shitting on those living down the hill by letting their sewer come out outside the settlements for others to cope with it. How heroic is it that the Palestinian people are still managing to squeeze a bit of life in the midst of this? and what is there more to say that does not sound cheap? I seriously am not enjoying the prospect of presenting this keynote. The second entry came following reading a Haaretz article on the occasion of what would have been Walter Benjamin’s 120th birthday telling the story of his suicide as he lost hope of escaping the Nazis in Marseille. The thought of someone as grand, as brilliant and as sensitive a thinker as Walter Benjamin being subjected to so much humiliation leading to his suicide always hits me hard: It always makes me so sad reading about this. You think 'fuck fascism and anti-Semitism. Never Again'. Fascist anti-Semitic evil might have been banal but that didn't stop it being close to a form of pure evil. and the struggle against fascist anti-Semitism is as 'pure good' as you can get. except for those who pollute it by investing it with the function of legitmizing zionist fascism. I wouldn't say all forms of zionism are like this, but this is really what the dominant form of zionism in Israel is: a pollution of the struggle against anti-semitism. The third entry was not that long ago following Rudd’s infamous introduction of the ‘PNG solution’ to deal with the dangerous encirclement of Australia by billions of Third World Looking creatures coming to get us: To help think the culture to which Rudd's asylum seekers' policy is appealing to and which he hopes will find him appealing - a creative modification of some cultural and dictionary definitions: *Stingy, Mean* both mean reluctant to part with money, goods, possessions or benefits. unwilling to share, give, or spend possessions or benefits. *Mean* also suggests a small-minded, ignoble, petty stinginess leading to miserable, cheerless, or vacuously cheerful, living. *battlers* old Australian English: working class people. New Australian English: lower middle class people who desire and think they deserve to be upper middle class. Old Marxist English: 'petty bourgeois shits'. Characterised by a permanent state of insecurity and a permanent sense that more privileges are never enough. Often believe newspaper reports that the 'Australian economy is booming' and feel that things are never booming enough for them when compared to X and Y. *Ordinary Australians* Australian-born and immigrants who can't believe their luck that they're born, or have successfully settled, in Australia, and got away with occupying and making use of indigenous land without having to pay for it - see for comparative purposes 'Israeli settlers' - Can't shake a sense of loving what they have being perturbed by a feeling of 'haunted enjoyment'. This sentiment has been referred to in a previous Hage publication as 'the sensitivity of thieves'. *Lucky-worried Australians* another product of the unequally shared 'economic boom'. A prototype of the lucky-worried subject is a person who is given a business class upgrade on (usually) a very short flight, can't believe their luck, but instead of enjoying it, they spend their time worrying about economy class people entering the business class cabin to use the toilet. The final one, which actually initiated these reflections, came about when a colleague made a light-hearted comment about my recent habit of replacing my own photo on my facebook page with that of ‘dead anthropologists’. I am teaching a subject on Marcel Mauss’ book The Gift and I initially had a photo of him standing for me. Now that I have moved to teach the well-known influence of The Gift on the thought of Claude Levi-Strauss, it is his picture that is occupying my little photographic fantasy space. I replied to my colleague that I find it quite useful and enjoyable to have this little identity shift as I am reading and teaching particular thinkers. I then mentioned, kind of en passant, that I also found it a bit perversely enjoyable to embody or let myself be embodied by the spirit of both Mauss and Levi-Strauss insofar as they are both Jewish thinkers. But then I remembered a night I was reading about Mauss’ personal history and discovered that he too had been subjected to the humiliation of the Nazis towards the end of his life and so I added: Actually not always enjoyable I was seriously shattered when I became aware that Marcel Mauss in the last days of his life had to walk with a yellow star stuck on his jacket. It was not dissimilar to learning about Benjamin’s death. If anything it was even more upsetting. I always identified with Marcel Mauss far more than with his uncle Emile Durkheim, who was a bit ‘priestly’ for my taste. Marcel Mauss loved life, was a good eater and a cook, and had a great sense of humour. So again the thought of this great mind being demeaned by the murderous and mediocre Nazi machine upset me immensely. I actually cried in my bed that night as I was reading about it. It was not that I consider the intellectual victims of Nazism intrinsically more important than any other victim. It was more a reflection of the kind of people I end up identifying with and sublimating as an academic. It was while recalling this that the thought came to my mind that some of the sentiments of disgust, anger and pain that I mention above, and that I experienced reading about Mauss and Benjamin were not that dissimilar from the sentiments I experienced when I started thinking about asylum seekers following Rudd’s pronouncements on the ‘PNG solution’. And certainly not dissimilar to how I felt when I toured the occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed after my Palestinian tour I also had to retreat to my room to let myself cry. I felt ashamed feeling the urge to cry while those who were actually subjected to this inhuman treatment stoically enduring it by my side. So I had to retreat to do it. What really got to me in Palestine was the settlers letting their sewage run on Palestinian villages. Twice we were driving through a Palestinian village when suddenly there was an invasion of the smell of the Israeli shit ‘landing’ nearby. I kept thinking to myself that a historical and ethical line was crossed here somewhere: ‘you colonize and you oppress, ok, it’s been done before, but to also literally shit on the people you are colonizing takes colonization into a different realm’. It then struck me that in fact there was probably a classificatory affinity in the eyes of the Israeli colonists between shit and the Palestinians. What differentiates Israeli Apartheid from South African Apartheid is that white South Africans actually needed black South Africans as cheap labour, while the Israelis have no necessary need for Palestinian labour. Indeed they had no need for the Palestinians full stop. And so, in the colonists’ eyes, Palestinian space is always already a kind of social rubbish dump suitable for letting one’s sewage run into it. The historians of slavery have often pointed out that despite the vile racism that characterized slavery, slave owners had an interest in the well-being of their slaves. After all they were their property and they were useful. This was not so in the case of the Israeli relation to the Palestinians. This is when I thought that the similarity of the sentiment that came to me in Palestine, and when reading about the Nazi victimization of Mauss and Benjamin was precisely this: the extreme devalorisation of people that I highly valorized; a dumb, insensitive, machine-ic and relentless devalorisation which went as far as treating people like disposable waste. And is that not what is particularly vile about Australia’s ‘PNG solution’? The vileness resides in the very mode of speaking of refugees by refusing to address them in the sense of looking them in the eyes, and recognize their tragic experiences, while addressing instead ‘the business plan’ of the people smugglers who are supposedly transporting and circulating them. It makes one feel as if Rudd and company could just as easily be discussing the illegal dumping of chemical waste or something along this line. So, there are situations where saying that colonisation can be a ‘mode of rubbishing’ people is more than engaging in flowery metaphors. ‘Rubbishing’ is actually a colonial technique. Indeed even Australia’s colonization of indigenous people took more a form of rubbishing than a form of exploitation of the labour of the colonized. Exterminating people by ‘rubbishing them’ is always less dramatic than when it is done through massacres. It is more like dumping a truck that one has destroyed somewhere on one’s property and letting it slowly rust, corrode and disintegrate. This is perhaps a dominant Australian mode of racial extermination, but there are variations on the same theme throughout the colonial world. The historian of French intellectual life, Didier Eribon, tells this story: I recall what Georges Dumézil told me about the day when, during the war, he went to visit his master and friend Marcel Mauss and saw for the first time the yellow star sewn onto his clothing. He could not take his eyes off this frightful stigma. The great sociologist then remarked to him: “You are looking at my gob of spit.” For a long time I understood this phrase in the most straightforward way: Mauss meant that he considered this bit of yellow cloth as a dirty stain, a piece of filth thrown in his face. But eventually someone pointed out to me that I was mistaken: Mauss had doubtless used the word “crachat” [literally, “gob of spit”] in the sense of “decoration.” And indeed, one of the old demotic meanings of the word “crachat” is that of insigne, medal, or decoration. We can trust Mauss, the master analyst of symbolic exchange, to know how to receive a blow and turn it, at least from a personal symbolic perspective, to his favour. Ultimately he manages to replay for us in his own way an old dramatic move: the act of wearing one’s humiliation like a badge of honour. It is with this question that I want to end here: who are today the inheritors of this ambivalent badge of honour? Who are the wearers of the equivalent of the yellow star today? Certainly, it is those asylum seekers and indigenous people everywhere who are heroically struggling against their colonial rubbishing. This is true even in the case of Palestine despite the Zionist claims of being the inheritors of the yellow star par excellence. For as numerous Jews inside and outside Israel know, the honour associated with the yellow star is not something that can be transmitted ethnically. It is something earned by living up to the nobility of the tragic experience of which it is a metonymy. This is why, while this star has to remain yellow, for anti-Semitism remains a real and present danger in today’s world, it nonetheless also comes with the added colours of Palestine as well as the colour of all those other indigenous people and refugees who are ‘rubbished’ in history.

Sexism and Julia

One of the most difficult things I have always experienced when teaching about racism and anti-racism is how to break the instinctive association we often make between goodness and victimhood; the idea that those who are subjected to something bad must be good. It is a deeply engrained thing for, if it is presented in the form of a straightforward logical argument, such as: 'people who are subjected to something bad can be bad, so people subjected to racism are not necessarily good', most people are likely to agree and think that this is quite obvious, and yet the same people are likely to continue to make the slippage between victimhood and goodness at any unguarded moment where they are not being intellectually reflexive enough. Likewise, the argument that 'racism makes life difficult' does not mean that the person subjected to it is otherwise really efficient and graceful. This is partly, but only partly, because thinking of people as victimised is a universalising mode of classification, that is, the classification of someone as victim invites, not by necessity but often enough, a universal image of the victim abstracted from the particularities of whoever is being victimised. through this abstraction the 'victim position' becomes an empty signifier on which the person noting the victimisation can latch their own fantasies of the 'good victim' without being encumbered by the specificities of any particular victim. I am thinking about this because this bears some similarities to the way some feminists are interpreting the fall of Gillard as a prime minister. They position her in the very universalising positions of 'woman' and 'the first woman prime minister', and then proceed to show all the sexism she has been subjected to, all of which, to be clear, is true. But then we are left to make a slippage from this sexism to Gillard's goodness: she has achieved so much, look at all the good policies that have been implemented, so how else to explain her lack of support in the electorate? This is not necessarily an argument against sexism as an explanation but it is an argument about the limits of how much a universalising mode of thinking sexism can explain. For instance, no commentator I know seems to be willing to entertain the idea that part of what Gillard has been subjected to has also to do with her being a 'particular kind of woman' not just a 'woman'. The idea that the sexism that was directed at her was directed at her because she was Julia not any other woman. It is very hard to think what this particularity is but I keep making this thought experiment. If Penny Wong was Prime Minister, I am sure she would have been subjected to some of the sexism that Gillard has been subjected to. Plus, she would have been subjected to racism and to homophobia. And yet, I cannot help thinking that I am right in saying that there would be some types of humiliation that Gillard has been subjected to that would never have been directed at someone like Penny Wong. What are these Gillard particularities/specifities that make the behaviour she has been subjected to possible, I am not sure. It could still be about sexism but it might be about the particularities of Australian sexism and its 'imaginary' of the type of woman that is ok to humiliate - after all sexism is not necessarily about humiliating all women who are in positions of power. For instance, it was the peculiarities of British sexism, not lack of sexism, that allowed someone like Thatcher to thrive as a leader. Pauline Hanson's attempted humiliation by the media worked for her not against her. Other explanations of why Gillard has been subjected to so much could also be something specific to Julia's 'presentation of self in everyday life' as Goffman would say, etc... There could be something about her broad not so classy accent. Australians like to think of themselves differently but they really do like their prime ministers to be a bit 'of distinction'. A male might turn their working class belonging into something endearing, classy and prime ministerial but it will be more difficult for a woman. It could also be that no matter what or how good the rules of the Labor Party are, people don't like others deposing the leaders they have elected, and that this has given Gillard the aura of a coup leader, or even worse, the aura of someone who has been placed in power by less visible coup leaders. It could also be something very disenchanting about Gillard's very achievements. They are arguably well executed social policies. But is that not what one expects the public service to do. what is the difference between the public service and government, at least in people's minds? shouldn't government be presenting some fantasy element that is in excess of 'policy'. perhaps this disenchantment reveals politics for what it now is. that's not something people thirsty for fantasies like. It could be many things, but by not thinking about them, social analysts and commentators who are drowning everything in 'sexism' as a universalising explanation are avoiding thinking about some difficult questions.

COUGHING OUT THE LAW: PERVERSITY AND SOCIALITY AROUND AN EATING TABLE. It was lunchtime at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-market department store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around mid-day, precisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the exceptionally succulent off the bone ham sandwich at the roast carvery section. You can buy it and sit and eat it at a large ‘communal’ table nearby. So here I was enjoying my super sandwich with a bottle of mineral water and reading the approaching Sydney Film Festival program when opposite me across the roughly 1.5 meter wide table came and sat an older woman. She seemed in her seventies, well, but conservatively, dressed, and not a single part of her visible self was left to chance: ‘tirée à quatre épingles’ as the French say. She had a sushi roll in an open plastic container and a bottle of water. She opened a paper serviette on the table in front of her as if to mark a space of her own, and opened her bottle of water, carefully positioning the cap on the serviette. She then opened a sachet of soy sauce, poured it on the sushi roll, and again positioned the sachet very neatly on the serviette. I lost interest and went back reading about films and eating my sandwich. Not long after, I put my head up as I hear the woman say: ‘Excuse me’. There was something unpleasant in the way she said it and I looked behind me to see if she was speaking to someone else. But she kept her eyes on me and said quite loudly: ‘No. You.’ If there was something midly unpleasant about the ‘excuse me’, the ‘No. You’ was unabashedly aggressive – a spectre of my severe super-ego masquerading as a not-amused Queen Elizabeth-like figure speaking to me with imperial tones floated around. And what it had to say was even less pleasant. To my utter astonishment the woman spoke clearly for everyone on the table to hear: ‘Do you mind putting your hand on your mouth when you cough’? Heads turned. To say that I was embarrassed and unhappy would be an understatement. I had coughed. It was ‘true’, as Fanon said on that train. And I am not mentioning Fanon because his name came to me by chance. I did feel that I was, for the first time in my life, being subjected to some in-your-face racializing, a ‘look Mamma a black man’-Fanon-on-the-train-like situation. For while it was true that I coughed, it was (please, please, please believe me) the mildest of coughs. And what’s more, I did (please, please, please believe me) turn my head discretely away from the table. This woman was picking on me! I was convinced she was trying to create for her own benefit a ‘First-world-looking civilised person trying to stop third-world-looking guy from polluting the atmosphere in middle class store’-type scene. Things happened very fast. Very quickly, instantly, my embarrassment gave way to an aggressive combativeness, and in less than a split second I knew that anything of the order of: ‘I did move my head’, or ‘I am quite far away from you’ or ‘It was only a mild cough’ would have been a succumbing to the way she had defined the parameters of the situation. It took less than another split second more for me to assume a very unaffected but nonetheless combative and ready for further attacks posture. I looked her back in the eyes and said: ‘Look, if you are old and lonely, there must be better ways of socializing.’ And I pretended to be back reading my paper as if I was not concerned at all by what she had said and what had just happened. Given that I had firmly fixed an image of her in my mind as an aggressive kind of woman, I was also ready for her to make some vicious riposte, and I was already preparing to rip into her again. But, when I looked up, to my astonishment, I realised that she was now quietly crying. Now I was embarrassed in a completely different way. And while, before, everyone on the table was looking at me with a degree of uncertainty trying to figure out ‘what a man who coughs without putting his hand on his mouth looks like’, now everyone was looking at me as ‘the little monster who made the old lady cry’. It’s ‘true’, Fanon would have said. Suddenly I was occupying a space of vacillation. First, I was no longer so sure that this was all about racism. While the manner the woman addressed me was clearly unacceptable, there was room to doubt whether she intended to racialise me. Have I not done here what I have often warned my ‘anti-racism’ students against doing: just because there is a history of racialization does not mean anyone who shows aggression in an inter-racial context is by necessity racializing. Anti-racism is very much a child of the Marx, Nietzsche, Freud tradition of critique that Ricoeur has called the hermeneutic of suspicion. And as Eve Sedgwick wonderfully put it: it is a tradition governed by the injunction ‘you can never be paranoid enough’ (2003: 127). There is a possibility that the woman was racializing me, but there is a possibility that she wasn’t. It could well be the case that she was just being a nuisance, not necessarily a racist nuisance. So, why did I go for the ‘paranoid’ racist option, which probably intensified the cruelness of my response? Was it her demeanour that made the ghosts of English colonial history come and nibble my ham sandwich? Or was it me? Researching and thinking too much about racism can make one see racism in its most subtle manifestations. Sedgwick tells us that such lucidity is part of paranoid thinking. But such thinking can also make one see racism where there is nothing racist to see. One dream I had following the DJs encounter, and I had quite a few, played out the theme of racism in a particularly funny way, that probably also reveals an unsavoury part of my Christian Middle Eastern unconscious. I was holding the sandwich and looking at the woman who was no longer recognizable and trying to explain to her the significance of the fact that what I was eating was a ham sandwich: ‘Hello… can’t you see this is a… HAM… sandwich’ (I was not actually saying it but inviting her to realise what I was thinking). The dream’s assumption was that all racism was anti-Muslim racism and that the lady should have realised she was making a category mistake Despite its ridiculousness the dream was an invitation to go back and concentrate on the original scene. How can I try to further understand what has happened on that day if I am not to go back to the original reason I was there in the first place: to enjoy a ham sandwich? I really enjoy those ham sandwiches. Deep down I am perhaps a bit embarrassed, but only a bit, by the degree to which I enjoy good food. In Paris, when I was a guest of Pierre Bourdieu as a post-doc, if I had to choose between a Bourdieu lecture and an invitation to a good restaurant, I’ve never failed to choose the latter. The jouissance I derive from the libidinal, particularistic and one to one relation between me and the food I am eating is an important fantasy space for me. A pre-oedipal fantasy space a Freudian might say, which could explain the aggression directed as those who puncture the fantasy with unwanted comments and interactions. So, there was room for ambivalence: maybe this had nothing to do with racism and all about my shameful food fantasies. But there was also another source of ambivalence. When I saw the woman crying, I was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that I had hit the nail on the head: she clearly did feel old and lonely. So, faced with an ‘old and lonely’ woman in tears, part of me wanted to forget everything and just apologise, but part of me was still reeling from the ‘put your hand on your mouth’ bullying and didn’t want to apologise at all. In the end, I didn’t find it in me to do so. Even at that time, letting the lady cry without apologizing seemed cruel, especially since, I was already being ambivalent about whether she was a racist old lady or not. Yet, I couldn’t let go of my cruelty. Indeed, I would go as far as saying that for a moment there, I was enjoying my cruelty. But I was also scared of myself for feeling this way. Thus, I was clearly occupying a space of vacillation, or ambivalence as Freud would say. If little Hans’ ambivalence classically exhibited itself in the way he both feared his father and feared for his father (Freud 1909), there was something classical about my ambivalence towards my cruelty: I feared it and I feared for it to. I was scared of it: scared that it would take over me and transform me from someone who enjoyed a moment of cruelty into someone cruel. And yet, there was no doubt that I was enjoying it. It provided me with a scene, which, at a time when I felt threatened, allowed me to stage my self in a viable manner. So this was how it all ended. I was ambivalent about the lady’s rudeness and racism, ambivalent about the cruelty I exhibited, and ambivalent about myself for liking it. With the woman drying her tears (someone actually gave her a tissue) and people still looking at me, I was increasingly finding both the situation I was in, and myself, unbearable. I picked up what was left of my sandwich and my bottle of water and angrily got up and left. It was a memorable sandwich-eating session, and understandably I kept replaying in my head what had happened for a very long time. While I will never be certain that the woman cried because she was confronted with her loneliness by my comments, I kept thinking about the likelihood that she was. By chance, this raised issues concerning the nature of sociality, right-based entitlement and the law that I have been examining in my ethnographic work with the Lebanese diaspora. In one piece I am writing, I look at youngish cosmopolitan Lebanese from London, Paris, New York and Montreal, who enjoy going back to Lebanon to experience a sense of freedom from being straightjacketed by excessive laws and regulations in all aspects of their lives, the latter being part of their experience of living in the West. The analysis brings to the fore questions concerning the role of the law in mediating social relations: while the law makes social relations possible, is there a point where society can be said to have ‘too many laws’? At the heart of the matter are three issues all of which have a bearing on the DJs incident: 1. The first issue has to do with the difficulties emanating from the way the law ‘individualises’ and in so doing favours a form of public togetherness that does not threaten to dissolve individual sovereignties. Social and philosophical critiques of modernity and capitalism, since Rousseau, Hegel and Marx have often enough lamented the processes of individuation to which people are subjected in western societies. Sartre famously called this social and yet individuated existence la série, which to him was a kind of fundamental state of alienated sociality. One is struck for example, by how different the usage of public space is for working and under-class people in Beirut and in Sydney. While people in Beirut go to such public spaces to interact with the public, in Sydney, when people go to parks and beaches, they often go to claim a bit of public space as their own. This is hardly restricted to the under or working classes though. I live in a milieu of people who are all militantly committed to public spaces. Yet, whenever we go to a park or to the beach I often hear people say: ‘let’s find a place where there aren’t too many people’. People spread their blanket not only for comfort but as a mode of claiming public space as one’s own, a space where others should not thread, for the duration of its usage. A similar spirit seems to animate the woman at DJs in the way she spread her serviette on the ‘communal’/public eating table. 2. In so far as the law creates a relationality between people, it is a relationality of subjects who have been abstracted from their particularity by virtue of them being the subjects of national laws: citizens – which, as is well known, is what allows them to be ‘all equal before the law’. Here the law always seems to stage a tension between the libidinal and the abstract, the particular and the universal, dimensions of people. What makes a public eating space so interesting is that on one hand it is a public space which encourages the kind of abstract subjectivities referred to above and yet it is also an eating place where our bodily self, and indeed our libidinality is heavily manifested. As such, to eat on a public table is to continuously aim to negotiate the libidinal and legal/abstract self. While one is deploying one’s own libidinal self to enjoy the food, one is deploying the legal self to protect oneself from one’s own libidinality as well as the libidinality of others – such as claiming the right not to be coughed at. This leads directly to the final point/issue. 3. There is always a threshold whereby certain laws designed to protect citizens and facilitate sociality become excessively protective such as to become a hindrance to sociality. This is highlighted in the classical Zizekian tale of the black fat lesbian non-smoking female office worker: the law protects her against racism, sexism, weight discrimination, homophobia, and smoking, tells us Zizek, but… no one in the office talks to her. Following Lauren Berlant (2011), one could argue that there is an embryonic structure of ‘cruel optimism’ that is at the heart of the law: it opens a space that both optimistically enhances and cruelly hinders the possibility of sociality. How much cruelty and how much optimism changes from one social and historical setting to another. It depends on what socio-legal structures of sociality a particular formation has to offer. But it also depends on the subject’s capacity to squeeze different kinds of socialities out of given situations. At one level, the woman at DJs seem to be an unreflexive enactor of an alienated form of seriality: happy with her individuality, happy with her sovereignty that can afford her the space of a serviette on a public table, happy to protect the sanctity of her abstract self in the face of the cough/libidinality of the other. At another level, however, her bullying reveals her to be a strategist – an unhappy and desperate strategist, but a strategist nonetheless— aiming to position herself out of the impasse of solitude and a-sociality in which the social world has located her. Seen in this light, her ‘don’t cough on me’, rather than, or perhaps along with, being the expression of a further desire for protection from any interaction with others, was also in fact an expression of the opposite: a desire for sociality in a space where sociality was at its minimum. As always with repressive structures, one ends up with sexuality and libidinality in both the repression and the transgression. Michael Taussig has shown us in his work, via Bataille, how there is ‘a certain sexual quality of the law and of breaking the law, the beauty and libidinality of transgression’ (1992: 124). ‘Don’t cough on me’ can conjure up the libidinal just as much as it represses it, while also simultaneously being a rejection and an invitation to sociality. As Marshall Sahlin reminds us in his comparison between Hobbes and Mauss, anthropology has amply shown us that sociality does not have to be the product of sharing subjection to a common law. It can also be ensured by exchange and reciprocity. A good example, of clear relevance to us here, is Claude Levi-Strauss’s famous portrayal of wine exchange on the eating tables of southern France (1969). Even where sociality is largely regulated within a space of legality, there is always another sociality regulated by reciprocity and exchange. While people certainly don’t exchange their drinks on today’s public eating tables (which are actually becoming popular again in many restaurants and cafes), people nonetheless do exchange small talk (if only in the form of what Malinowski (1924) called ‘phatic communication’). Somehow, perhaps because it is an eating table at a department store where eating subjects are already individualised by their experience as consumers, DJs table is, on the whole, free from even such brief and light chit-chat. It is from this perspective that the woman’s bullying can be, within the social space of exchange and reciprocity, an offering made with the only shareable means of relationality left to her, taken from the space of legality: the assertion of her entitlement to be free of bodily relationality. It is an ambivalent kind of offering but an offering nonetheless: “telling you ‘don’t interact with me’ is the only thing left for me to offer as a means to interact with you and squeeze a bit of sociality from such a sociality-free situation”. She was still snatching a bit of optimism at the very place where society was at it cruellest as it were. In that she still had it in her to try and socialise, even by offering such a perverse gift, as it were, perhaps she was revealing herself to be less alienated and accepting of the a-social regime that everyone else on the table that day, including myself, had happily accepted. For while, at another level, I have stressed her acceptance of the alienated regime of sovereign individuality in the way she delineated a bit of her personal space with her serviette, was I not myself, even more happily, but less visibly, doing the same by forming a closed circle between myself, my ham sandwich, my bottle of water and my Sydney Film Festival program? Despite her objectionable behaviour, she was perhaps the radical one on the table, unaccepting of existing forms of un-sociality and still hoping for the possibility for some other form of relationality. And it could well be, as my friend and colleague Stephen Muecke suggested, that sociality might have surged at the table after I made to those seated at the table the offer of my absence.   BIBLIOGRAPHY Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Sigmund Freud (1909) Analysis of a phobia of a five year old boy. In The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 8, Case Histories 1, 1977, pp. 169-306. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The elementary structures of kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Bronislaw Malinowski "The problem of meaning in primitive languages", supplement to Ogden, C. & Richards, I. (eds.), The Meaning of Meaning, London: Routledge, (1923) 1946. Marshall Sahlin, Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1972. Michael Taussig, The Nervous System, New York: Routledge, 1992. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

Palestine: a ionesco play

Buildings are being erected throughout the play.

a group of Palestinian men and women: you've robbed us and taken from us nine out of the ten bedrooms that made up our house and now you are robbing us of our last bedroom

Spiritually Blessed Land Thief: Look, I really want to end the antagonism between us. I am going to put an end to the official process of robbing you. I'll only allow it to happen unofficially. we'll call it a temporary freeze. Let's talk peace.

Historically proven to be really efficient and unbiased American intermediary: now that's what I call fair. don't do the same mistake of refusing what is generously being offered.

Palestinian group of men and women start arguing; some scream 'let's be realist and take whatever we can end up with'; others say 'no point, they are intent on taking everything we should keep on claiming back everything'.

Palestinians for any piece of peace: we are for peace

Historically proven to be really efficient and unbiased American intermediary: good to see that there are still some rational and reasonable palestinians who are committed to peace. let's bring them to the peace table.

Palestinians not for peace: We have nothing to do with this. It seems that Being Spiritually blessed by god works well for some so we'd better do the same thing. From now on we are the Spiritually Blessed anti-Land thieves. we'll do anything that God tells us to do to stop you.

Spiritually Blessed Land Thief to American peace-seeking intermediary: see they're not very reasonable people. They're religious fundamentalists on top of that. not like us Spiritually Blessed urban cosmopolitans. Clearly there's no peace partner there.

Palestinians for any piece of peace to Historically proven to be really efficient and unbiased American intermediary: we are for peace but you have to make sure they don't keep stealing the last bedroom bit by bit.

American peace-seeking intermediary: didn't you hear what the Blessed Thief said. there is a temporary freeze. you are only being robbed unofficially. grasp this window of opportunity while it lasts.

Spiritually Blessed Land Thief: Too late. God's pressure is too great. we have to start stealing your land officially again. End of the freeze.

Palestinians for any piece of peace: that's not fair. we only agreed to have peace if you keep stealing the land unofficially.

Spiritually Blessed Land Thief: So I have officially resumed stealing your land while we're negotiating peace. why should that matter? I invite you not to let such minor details affect your commitment to peace. you should know that my hand and my heart are open for the peace of the brave.

Palestinians for any piece of peace: No! We insist on our right to be robbed unofficially. Our honour is at stake here.

Historically proven to be really efficient and unbiased American intermediary: Come on you guys, let's not miss this GOLDEN opportunity.

Tea Party needs some soothing herbal tea

I am not saying this is the only thing that the Tea Party is about, but I was hearing some of them interviewed recently and they clearly have a historical continuity with the followers of David Duke (The Association for the Advancement of White People) that I did fieldwork with in Baton Rouge in the mid/late nineties.

Listening to them, I have no doubt that some are traumatised by the fact that they have a black president called Barack Hussein Obama. Like they really think the unthinkable is happening and are *seriously* traumatised in a way so foreign to our largely liberal imagination that our imagination cannot even begin to understand how traumatizing this is for them. I really think that most of the attempts to understand them with the usage of normal categories of sociological thought are bound to fail because it does not take into account the nature of their difference(similar to Islamic fundamentalists in this regard). They constitute a radical alterity. They are what Husserl calls an 'accessible inaccessibility'. They are accessible enough for us to know they are there but not enough to know what they are on about. You really need a serious prolonged fieldwork experience with them, one that takes you completely out of your comfort zone and make you reconsider your basic categories of understanding the political landscape if you are to begin to understand them. I hope/I am sure some researchers are already doing this.

My guess is part of their trauma is animated by the following paradox:

Trauma is not just about something you think is disastrous happening to you. It is about something disastrous happening such that your imagination is unable to internalise it and then find the language to express it. For the tea party people the trauma is that what they consider as one of the most sublime and sacred positions on earth: the presidency of the united states is occupied by what they consider as one of the most abject positions on earth: a guy that combines blackness (his look), liberalism (his politics) and Islam (his name). This creates a short-circuiting of the common racist imaginary as how can you say the things your really want to say about a liberal black guy with the name of Hussein while knowing that you are saying them about the president of the united states of America. All the other economic/globalisation etc...that animate this mob are emotionally articulated to that black/hussein-ish presidency.

The illocutionary force of leftist discourse

A very old and interesting debate at the interface of philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology is the question of the illocutionary force of an utterance. Most forcefully argued by J.-L. Austin, illocutionary force concerns the power of an utterance to act convincingly on a listener and whether such force is intrinsic to and a property of language as such or is derived from social positioning and social relations. So if someone says to you, 'you are intrinsically a moronic fool', what are the forces at work in the utterance that will make you consider the proposition seriously. Sociologists, a la Pierre Bourdieu, and sociologically influenced linguists like Austin, would argue that the capacity of the statement to have an impact depends on the social legitimacy and the authority of the speaker within given social relations. If a respected professor of linguistics makes this utterance to a junior colleague at a workshop, it is likely, though, of course, there might be other variables that can make a difference, that the person will take the statement seriously: it might devastate them, it might upset them and lead to a vigorous defence of their view, etc... The social setting influences in a variety of ways: the setting of the workshop in front of other colleagues might make the utterance exceptionally powerful and it might make the person on the receiving end more vulnerable. If it is uttered in a coffee shop at university, it might be less powerful. In a coffee shop outside the university even less powerful etc...
Sociological arguments of the social efficacy of language do not stop at this. Some linguists will argue that if the linguistic professor ends up, following a shipwreck, on a deserted island with people who don't know or understand the nature of his authority his utterance might still muster some linguistically rather than socially derived social efficacy. So, if he says to someone 'you are intrinsically a moronic fool', they might still be flabergasted by his capacity to put intrinsically, moronic and fool in one sentence and might submit to him. Sociologists will say that this is still a social power derived from the recognition of his social capacity to choose and put together certain words; that his authority still depends on someone recognizing that it is indeed skilfull to be able to put these words together. For, the professor might end up with people who are not impressed at all by either his choice of words or the way he utters them and might look at him and say: 'fuck off you bloody wanker' and the professor's power might just melt away.
Nonetheless, for Bourdieu, people with power internalise their position of power and it ends up reflecting itself in their statements. They acquire a habitus of power, or what Nietzsche would call a 'sense of power', which transcends specific situations. Like the old English aristocracy, which can loose all the social and economic basis of their power but still convincingly project a sense of artistocratic power. Bourdieu argues that this is so because every habitus has a conatus, a Spinoza-derived term meaning: a tendency to persevere in one's own being. The conatus allows for the reproduction of a sense of power even if the conditions which have given someone a sense of authority has disappeared.
Now that the lecture is over let me say that I feel that this applies to understanding progressive and conservative discourses today in Australia. I think that conservative utterances still project a sense of power from the Howard years despite the fact that the conditions of right wing dominance from which this sense of power was derived no longer exist. Progressive utterances on the other hand still suffer from the historical decline of left-wing thought and left-wing politics after the demise of Marxism and Communism. Yet, I feel that the elections show that there is a healthy section of the Australian population that is both progressive enough to not fall for 'the boats are coming discourse' or 'there is no such thing as global warming', ethical enough not to feel like rewarding a power-driven instrumentalist political culture of assassination no matter which side of the political spectrum it emerges from, and what's more they have a good acute sense of social justice. So, I hope the progessive left will now start to re-internalise a sense of power and legitimacy so that they can convincingly tell the racist/populationists, the anti-environmentalists, etc... exactly what they ought to hear about themselves: that they are intrinsically a bunch of moronic fools. The progressives must be able to withstand those reactionary journalists who, affecting to represent the 'true people', will tell them something: 'fuck off you bloody wankers'. They must now see them for what they are, people who are trying to bolster their legitimacy by affecting to represent a population they no longer represent.

The conservative mood

Why is it that everywhere left liberals succeed in getting elected to government they have to spend their time defending themselves against aggressive right wing attempts to delegitimize them as if it is the conservatives who are in power and the government in opposition?
It is a bit of a mystery because on one hand one can say that the general mood is conservative and the government has to cater for that general mood. Yet, the left liberal government did get elected after all.
This is true of Australia where sometimes you would really think that it is the Liberal party that is in power and the government in opposition. The conservatives make their points as if they own the moral high ground while all left positions are uttered as if apologetically. This is all the more strange since the opposite is true. Why can someone like Abbott manage to take such a morally bankrupt position on boat people and sound so aggressively self-righteous and moral at the same time? It is truly puzzling. Why do atheists need to act as if they have something to apologise for?
We see the same thing in the US, with Obama elected as a left liberal but the conservatives acting *convincingly* as if the government is illegitimate from day one. Witness the Mosque debate now. Never have so many morally bankrupt people sounded so self-righteously moral. Why do conservatives get away with so much aggressivity while in opposition while elected governments who represent the majority have to be careful about right wing sensitivities? Why does not the right feel the need to be careful about left wing sensibilities?
I truly find this puzzling. and I don't think it is just because the left liberals who get elected are whimps. They are. But there is some deep tendency in the Western collective unconscious that is governing the mood of our times and I can't really work out what it is.