headless

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's third film, La mujer sin cabeza, concerns a mysterious accident on a dusty road in the provinces.

Of course, the accident is only mysterious because the woman who causes it, the middle-class protagonist Verónica, allows it to be so. The quest that structures the bulk of the movie, and that turns around the question "Who or what did she hit?" really begs the more fundamental question of "Why did she run?"

We have seen, in the opening scenes, a trio of local kids playing with their dog in the road near a dried-up drainage ditch or canal. We then shift to a social event, full of inconsequential gossip that we strain to understand and contextualize, from which the bleached-blonde Verónica then heads home. As she is on the road, her cellphone rings and it is while she is distracted, trying to find the phone and take the call, that with a jolt and a lurch she runs over something or someone.

Shaken, she sits in the car while the radio discordantly plays an upbeat melody from the 1970s. A handprint on the car window reminds us both of the world she has just left (where we saw a young child leave the imprint on the glass) and also of the possibility that what she hit might well have been one of the kids we saw playing earlier.


But, recomposing herself slightly, Verónica drives on and only some yards further down the track stops to get out and wonder what kind of mess she has left behind her on the road. The camera captures only a blurred image out of focus; it looks perhaps like the dog, but there's no going back to investigate.

For the rest of the film, then, we are caught up in the protagonist's hazy sense of guilt and uncertainty about what might have happened. We have no direct access to Verónica's consciousness--there are almost no point-of-view shots--but somehow her confusion is contagious as we are never quite sure about the social relationships around her.

There's a husband, a brother, a lover, friends, and an endless stream of hired helps who do everything from cooking to massage. But if in some ways Verónica's class and social status (she's a dentist) seems always to have kept her insulated from the poverty of the broader society that surrounds her, now that insulation has turned to isolation and anomie.

Shortly after the accident, a rainstorm had set in and flooded the roadside canal at the scene. This is no cleansing shower, however; if anything, it merely muddies Verónica's tracks and makes it all the more difficult for her to figure out subsequently what she could so easily have ascertained before the rain set in.

After some pause, she confesses her sense of guilt to her husband. He and his friends reassure her that of course she must have hit some animal rather than the child who does indeed prove to be missing until his body is dredged up from the swollen canal. But for all their reassurances, it turns out that Verónica's intimates have carefully done the rounds to ensure that any trace of the collision and its consequences soon disappear: they quietly repair the car's front fender and wipe the record of Vero's subsequent hospital visit.

So Verónica is left with a sense of guilt, of doubt, but also ultimately of complicity. She dyes her hair as though she had something to hide, even if perhaps her true secret is that her doubts are in fact unfounded.

She has acquired the habit of deception even if there's nobody to deceive or nothing to deceive them about.

Shame, in short, need have no final cause. In what is an allegory of attitudes towards the past and the legacy of Argentina's dirty war, Martel seems to be suggesting that those who act as though they are guilty should indeed be treated as such. There is smoke without fire, and those who run even though they didn't hit anything do so because they know that, carelessly insulated and distracted in their SUV, they might have killed a child, and that's how they would react if they had.

YouTube Link: the film's trailer.

bigot

Well, yes, she is a bigot.

As Milena Popova points out (but sadly precious few others), what Gillian Dufffy said was indeed unacceptable.

Indeed, Duffy herself knows it. Here's the interesting thing: she presents her xenophobic comments as though she were bravely speaking out in the face of some tyranny of political correctness:

You can't say anything about the immigrants because you're saying that you're... all these Eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?

Presumably the ellipsis here indicates that "you can't say anything" about immigration because (surprise surprise!) you'll only be accused of racism.

Sadly, however, "Bigotgate" proves the opposite.

Gordon Brown can only point out anti-immigrant bigotry in what he assumes to be the privacy of the back seat of his campaign car. And when it turns out that this candid moment was overheard by Sky News's microphone, he cravenly apologizes (first on air, then in person) rather than simply making the point more eloquently and forcefully in public than in private.

Meanwhile, once again in the leader's debate Brown competes with Cameron to present himself as more forcefully against immigration even than Clegg's tepid proposal for a regional points-based policy and the occasional amnesty.

It is as though the BNP and the Daily Mail had fully succeeded in setting the agenda on immigration. For some reason it is now impossible, except (supposedly) discreetly and in private, to point out the everyday bigotry that blights British public discourse.

This is a craven capitulation by a political class that should and (as Brown's indiscretion shows) actually does know better.

And it foments a strangely unabashed xenophobia that hesitates only briefly to announce itself, like a nervous tic, before continuing on regardless: "I know this is racist, but I'll say it none the less and I dare you to correct me..."

Middlesex

Many will already have seen the news of the amazingly foolish decision by the University of Middlesex to close what is probably the most vibrant and most important department of philosophy in the United Kingdom.

Here, for what it's worth, is the letter of protest that I just sent:

French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies
797-1873 East Mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z1
Canada

April 30, 2010


Dear Professors Driscoll, Ahmad, House, and Esche:

I recently learned of the decision to close Middlesex University’s Department of Philosophy.

I share the grave concern already expressed by many colleagues worldwide about what appears to be a short-sighted policy that can only cause harm not only to the University but also to the reputation of British academia more generally.

Last year I had the good fortune to present a paper at the regular seminar hosted by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. I thus had the chance to experience the department’s extraordinary, and deservedly famous, atmosphere of intellectual engagement, with the lively participation of postgraduate students as well as academic staff.

The Centre, and the department as a whole, is very clearly a vibrant centre of research and postgraduate training. It is the very model of the critical thought and collaborative enterprise that should be valued by the University.

This is to say nothing of the prodigious contribution made by the department’s staff in their widely-disseminated research, in their leading role with the prestigious journal Radical Philosophy, in training a generation of young intellectuals in Philosophy and in inspiring others across a wide range of disciplines.

I can barely fathom the university priorities that allow this department, perhaps above all, to be selected for closure. It would send a terrible signal to the academic community in Britain and outside were this decision not reversed.

I implore you to reconsider.

Yours


Jon Beasley-Murray
Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies

Truly, British academia is in a sorry state when decisions such as this can even be contemplated. Apparently the given reasons are that the department "only" contributed 53% of its revenue to the central administration, rather than desired 55%, and that the university figures it can earn more of a financial profit from students on lab-based courses than from those in the Humanities.

What's most incomprehensible is that this petty penny-pinching so damages the university brand that it is surely financially as well as intellectually an act (as Radical Philosophy put it) of "wilful self-harm" on every level.

There's something more happening here than the simple marketization of academia, the encroachment of economic logic even in its most naked, neoliberal form. What we see here is an institution giving up altogether on the traditional vocation of the university.

Middlesex apparently no longer cares about its brand, its reputation, or even the neoliberal university's recast mission to present itself as a center of "excellence" (to use that much-abused buzzword).

It is as though Middlesex aspires to be something other than a university. Sadly, it is not alone in this "aspiration."

Samaranch

The Saturday photo, part XII: Juan Antonio Samaranch, recently deceased former president of the International Olympic Committee, performs a fascist salute in 1974.


Samaranch is fourth from the right.

For more details on the photo, see this article from The Times. See also Andrew Jennings, "Why Juan Antonio’s right arm is more muscular than his left (It’s had more exercise!) The Love that Dare Not Speak its Name".

Hat-tip to my friend Jaume Subirana.

Heidegger

And no, I haven't read Sein und Zeit.

Via Quick Study.

ceremonies

The Wednesday quotation, part XIV: Wu Ming on the "anti-globalization" protests:

Although it was inspiring and effective, the metaphor [of empire . . . as a castle besieged by a manifold army of peasants] was a misrepresentation. There was no real siege going on, as you can’t besiege a power that’s everywhere and whose main manifestation is a constant flow of electrons from stock exchange to stock exchange.

That misrepresentation would prove fatal in Genoa.

We were mistaking the power’s formal ceremonies for the power itself. ("Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise")

This seems right to me. I do still wonder about the effect (if any) of "power's formal ceremonies," and so likewise the effect (if any) of disrupting those ceremonies. Is there such a thing as a power that is absolutely non-ceremonial, that doesn't at all rely on such ceremonies? Or on the other hand, is there a ceremony that is truly empty of power?

Meanwhile, I find it rather amusing that Wu Ming took such inspiration from Slap Shot, of all films.

Coke

I don't own a television. This is not out of any particular principle: we had one back in the UK, but just never got around to buying one here in Canada. So I've never been in the Canadian media loop, and have never missed it. Plus I have plenty of other ways of distracting and/or entertaining myself, not least watching television shows that just happen to be packaged in convenient DVD packages.

So with the Olympics, and even though I really didn't see very much of it, I have been watching much more television than usual. And what strikes those of us who are not accustomed to it (or what strikes me perhaps even more particularly given my long exposure to the BBC) is less the programming, which I can get by other means, than the adverts. There are so many of them. And they are often so very odd.

There are two current adverts that were played throughout the Olympics that I find particularly strange, and particularly disturbing. And at the risk of this blog becoming (almost) all Canada (almost) all of the time, I note that they are both selling, in part, images of Canadian national identity. Or rather, they rely for their success on certain images of Canada that are dear to this country's inhabitants.

The first of these ads is this one, for Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee chain. It's discussed, among other places, on Darren Barefoot's blog. Frankly I still can't quite get my head around it, except to say that I think it is truly appalling.

The other ad is this one, for that rather recognizeably US brand, Coca Cola:



I find this extraordinary, too.

The commercial purveys a sense of Canadian identity tied up with sport, specifically hockey, and the rituals and memories that go with that: from playing street hockey to watching a game at school, going out to a bar, or seeing a match live. The Canadianness of this progression, or rather the way in which this is precisely an apprenticeship in Canadianness, is emphasized with images of flags and maple leaves and the consistent presence of red and white highlights. Of course, it is only gradually (and more obviously at a second viewing) that you realize that the most ubiquitous of these red highlights are those associated with Coca Cola: this is an ad about becoming Canadian by growing up with coke as well, if not more than, growing up with hockey. So we are to associate Canadianness equally with coke and with hockey: they form a nexus by which the viewer is to interpret his (or her) progression from child to adult.

But the odd thing is the ad's punchline: As the camera flies across an ice rink towards the goal, as though the viewer were put in the position of either a speeding player or indeed the puck itself, and as the music reaches a crescendo, with cheering in the background and a cutaway to three women in red raising their index fingers, we see spelled out between us and the goal the text: "Let's make sure everyone knows whose game their playing." We then cut to an overhead scoreboard on which we see coming into view... the iconic Coke bottle and the words "Coca Cola" repeated (for good measure) four times.

Again, I find this very strange. The advert works in so far as it takes for granted the fact that any Canadian is going to be able to answer the implicit question: Whose game are they playing? Why, hockey is Canada's game of course!

(The truth of this assertion, by the way, is as far as I can see very far from certain; in fact, of the NHL's famous "original six" teams, for instance, only two were from Canada, the other four all being from the US.)

But precisely because the ad's ideal viewer already knows the answer to this question, they are likely to misrecognize the answer that the ad itself seems to give to that question. For though the ad provides implicit acknowledgment of the contention that hockey is Canada's game, this is not what it actually says. Rather more explicitly, the answer it appears to provide to the question "Whose game are they playing?" is, well, that it is Coca Cola's game.

Now, we can perhaps understand this assertion two ways in so far as the ad is suggesting an absolute identification between Canada and Coke. Hockey is Coca Cola's game because it is Canada's game, and perhaps even vice versa. The circular identification between viewer, soft drink, and country is now complete: the viewer identifies with Coca Cola through his identification with Canada (and again, perhaps even vice versa). This is what the commercial appears to be trying to achieve. But this is surely a hard sell. For after all, what product is more fully identified with the USA, notionally the country whose claim to hockey is here being denied (though when was the last time that a non-US team won the Stanley Cup, I feel like asking), than Coca Cola? Coke is the quintessential product of American modernity. Why else do they call Americanization also "Coca Colonization"?

The other possible reading is an absolutely post-ideological one: the advert is telling us that hockey belongs to Coca Cola because, well, corporate interests have now fully bought up what is imagined to have once been the kind of communal organic activity that the ad's narrative initially suggests. Indeed, finally the story that the commercial most explicitly is telling is this: you grow up playing hockey, and thinking it is your sport, that it is a pastime that defines you and your imagined community; but then at some point you come to the realization that it isn't yours, it's been bought by corporations such as Coca Cola. They own it now, and don't you forget it.

Of course, this is a familiar narrative, too, and you wouldn't have to press a Canadian hard to hear it: they'd talk about "the trade" or about the opening of hockey in Sunbelt markets in the US while it is taken from hockey-mad cities such as Winnipeg. Any Canadian worth their salt can despair at the corporate takeover of their sport, and at the evils of the NHL's presiding commissioners that have allowed it to happen. (Such complaints, too, make up Canadian national identity.)

What's strange is to see one of those corporate interests telling this same story, too.

Chile II

My previous post on Chile was also propagated (as all this blog's posts are) on Facebook, where my good friend Loreto Navarete commented at length. With her permission. I'm reproducing her comment here (it's actually too long for the comment box on the post itself), and below I'll include my reply. Note, however, that she commented on a previous version of the post, which I've since revised in the light of some of her comments (and since have revised to clarify still further after somewhat similar comment on the blog itself).

Querido Jon, aunque en tu primer párrafo lanzas una clave de interpretaciñon plausible, el análisis sigue sobre la base de inexactitudes.

Para quienes sí vivimos el terremoto (todos quienes vivimos desde la región de Coquimbo hasta la región de la Araucanía (más de 1200 kilómetros desde norte a sur, en donde se concentra el 80% de la población de Chile) estaba claro que estábamos ante una catástrofe de proporciones.

A las 4.00 am aproximadamente ya se estaba evaluando la situación desde la oficina de emergencias, con la presidenta Bachelet a la cabeza. En efecto, ella jamás dijo que no se necesitaba ayuda internacional, lo que dijo es que había que dimensionar la situación para poder clarificar qué tipo de ayuda internacional se requería. A las horas se solicitó la ayuda internacional en hospitales de campaña, teléfonos satelitales, puentes mecano, equipos electrógenos, purificadores de agua y sistemas autónomos para diálisis, entre otras cosas. Ésa es una primera precisión.

La segunda, éste es el terremoto más grande y devastador en 50 años. No sólo afectó Concepción, sino también Santiago, Valparaíso y Viña del Mar, Rancagua, San Fernando, Talca, Curicó, Constitución, Talcahuano, Santa Cruz, y decenas de poblados costeros en donde, posterior al sismo, el tsunami terminó de arrasarlo todo. Ésa es una segunda precisión. No es un terremoto acotado a un territorio, como fue el de 1985, el de 1939, el de 1906 o incluso el de 1960. Éste es un terremoto que ha afectado seis regiones del país, dejando hasta ahora 2 millones de damnificados. Sólo en Santiago los daños estructurales en los edificios tanto patrimoniales, como públicos y residenciales (antiguos y nuevos) tendrán un costo de miles de millones.

En ese contexto, en menos de 2 minutos, el país vio como la única carretera que nos conecta con el sur quedó cortada impidiendo por horas, la llegada de ayuda; cómo el sistema de distribución de energía también colapsaba dejando sin electricidad, agua y comunicaciones a cientos de miles de personas. En ese contexto, y particularmente en la ciudad de Concepción, la posibilidad de saqueos era absolutamente real. Y no es primera vez que pasa en la historia de nuestros terremotos.

El terremoto, estamos de acuerdo, nos permitió ver lo que había detrás del decorado (y que no había que ser experto para verlo): las profundas desigualdades que existen en Chile, el miedo -también profundo- al otro que ya había planteado Lechner hace más de una década, y la fragilidad institucional e ineficiencia en la gestión que plantea la centralización política y administrativa.

En fin, da para largo, lo que quizás quiero decir con todo esto es que lo que ha ocurrido en Chile es un cataclismo -nada menos- y que aunque las imágenes de los saqueos y de los militares en las calles son seguramente muy provocadoras para analizarlas, no hay que olvidar que es cómo los medios han construido el relato de estos días, y esos medios -no podemos abstraernos de ello- están jugando un rol en un contexto político específico.

Un abrazo, Lore

In response, I wrote:

Lore, gracias por este comentario. Creo que estamos de acuerdo en casi todo: claro que sí fue (y es) un catástrofe, con consecuencias graves.

Mi única observación fue sobre la diferencia entre las expectactivas y representaciones de los desastres en Chile y Haiti, y así de las distintas imágenes sobre los dos países. Y claro que estoy hablando mayormente de los medios extranjeros. Pero en todos lados está la comparación. Aquí, por ejemplo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8543324.stm.

Bueno, sobre el papel de los medios en Chile mismo (y he estado leyendo también lo que dices en Twitter, sobre los rumores y el intento de fomentar pánico), bueno eso es otro asunto , aúnque quizás relacionado en tanto que esté reapareciendo una práctica de seguridad basada en un discurso de miedo hacia los pobres. Habrá en algún momento mucho para decir sobre eso, sin duda, pero claro que no fue mi intención en mi breve entrada.

Mientras tanto, gracias por la precisión sobre la actitud de Bachelet sobre la ayuda internacional. Otra vez, quizá sea esto simplemente una instancia más de como se ha escrito sobre el desastre en los medios, y revisaré lo que he puesto en el blog al respecto. Pero sí hubo mucho reportaje sobre esto, también. Vease por ejemplo http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2010/0301/Chile-earthquake-President-Bachelet-opens-up-to-foreign-aid.

Mientras tanto, sobre todo me alegra oir de tí. Estoy pensando en tí y en mis otros amigos chilenos. Un fuerte abrazo.

Let me just end by saying that my point is not to give credence to the way in which the disaster in Chile (or in Haiti) has been reported; rather, quite the opposite. And I am sure that there is much to be said about the ways in which it has been covered in Chile itself, but I have been reading the international rather than the national press, which is (again) precisely where such comparisons between Chile and Haiti have been most prevalent.

Chile

I have nothing very much against looting, particularly in the aftermath of a natural disaster of the scale witnessed a day or so ago in Chile. At a basic level, one does what one can to survive. More interestingly, it could also be seen as the inversion of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" thesis: taking advantage of a shock to the physical and material infrastructure in order to re-imagine social relations, now no longer in capital's favor but in the multitude's. As Rebecca Solnit argues:

The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo.

Part of this peculiar hopefulness arises, as Solnit also argues, from a realization of "the fragility of existing structures of authority." If this recognition leads to looting (no doubt itself the wrong word), then so be it.

And in some sense then it is no wonder that in the aftermath of disaster sovereign power is also so anxious to re-establish its authority, in large part for instance by stigmatizing the affected populations. And no doubt the more anxious that power is, the more it resorts to such tactics, even therefore at the cost of revealing the extent of its own fear and ineptitude.


Some of that ineptitude, the way in which disasters wrong-foot constituted power, can be seen in an examination of how the disasters in Haiti and Chile reveal such different expectations and representations of the two countries and their populations.

Note that I am here mostly talking about how the international media have covered these two tragedies, which appeared at first sight to offer an object lesson in the distinction between progress and poverty, civilization and barbarism. But in the end there is almost a certain wry amusement to be gained in seeing how wrong these representations have proved to be.

Haiti was of course treated as first and foremost a security problem, for which a military response was in order: Port au Prince and its slums had to be stabilized and secured before aid could be distributed; no doubt hundreds more lives were lost in the delays caused what what was fundamentally a racist fear and stigmatization of the threat of black violence. (Again, Rebecca Solnit is excellent on this.)

Chile, on the other hand, is one of the whitest of Latin American countries, and it regularly prides itself on being the most civilized and economically advanced; sometimes the Chileans think of themselves as the English of South America, and not just because they, too, don't know how to dance. The "Chilean model" is touted far and wide as the height of democratic order, economic efficiency, political transparency, and so on.

In line with the expectations that such images raise, initial reports on the earthquake that struck near Concepción emphasized how prepared the country was, how much better was its infrastructure and capacity to respond, how much more quickly it would bounce back. Its market-driven economic growth would barely wobble; after all the country is an "A plus student when it comes to economics". President Bachelet was even said to have initially declared that they needed no foreign aid on the basis precisely, Chilean commentator Patrico Navia was reported as saying, "that Chile is not Haiti. It is like Japan, or the US."

Indeed, comparisons with Haiti were overt and ubiquitous. The New York Times actively encourages teachers to draw quite literal lessons from pairing the two together.

The implication was clear: Chile, white and prosperous, could comfortably survive an earthquake that was many hundreds of times more powerful than the little tremor that touched that backward (and black) Caribbean island.

Ah. But now it turns out that, when push comes to shove, those white people are just a rabble of thieving ne'er-do-wells. Time to send in the tanks.

celebration

It's three in the morning, many hours after the Winter Olympics came to a close and (more to the point) long after Sid "the Kid" Crosby scored the dramatic overtime goal that gave Team Canada its final, and most dearly coveted, gold medal by beating the USA at (ice) hockey.

Yet even now I can hear the shouts and celebrations on the streets of downtown Vancouver below my apartment window. And I don't even live that close to the epicenter of the extraordinary street party that broke out as soon as that puck entered the net. The celebrations are no doubt in full swing on Granville and Robson Streets, some six or seven blocks away.

In the afternoon and early evening, the so-called Granville Entertainment District and nearby Robson Square were mobbed with thousands of mostly red-and-white clad revelers, chanting "Go Canada Go" or "Crosby, Crosby, Crosby," giving each other high fives and hugs, ringing cowbells and hooting horns, climbing lampposts and bus shelters, and bursting into impromptu renditions of "O Canada!"


This notoriously reticent and self-effacing country has perhaps finally learned the trappings and gestures of nationalism. Of course, Canadians have always quietly considered themselves superior; but the emphasis has been on the quiet sense of distinction. Indeed, the exuberant displays of pride visible over the past few hours would previously have been considered to be precisely the kind of gauche jingoism that Canada had associated with other, more vulgar and less civilized nations.

So one consequence of all the flag-waving and chanting is that Canadians may be a little less smug in the future: they've shown that they can be just as blindly patriotic as (say) their neighbors to the south. As they become more ostentatiously Canadian, they undermine that sense of entitlement that comes precisely from the notion that "ostentatious" and "Canadian" are two words that don't really belong in the same sentence.

The more visibly Canadian they become, the less "Canadian" they actually are.

And perhaps it's for this reason that so many of the most visibly and audibly frenetic of the revelers were the so-called "new" Canadians, the relatively recent immigrants (and their children) from China, Japan, India, and so on.

Vancouver is, after all, an extraordinarily multicultural city; about 40% of its inhabitants were born outside of Canada, most of whom come from Asia though with a significant proportion also from places such as Southern or Central Europe. And yet there are times when this is not so obvious: the various ethnic groups are parceled out around the city and a huge number of Chinese Canadians, for instance, live and work in suburbs such as Richmond, just to the south.

Yet it was clear that very many of the crowds who poured across the bridges (some of which were soon closed to vehicular traffic because of the sheer numbers of pedestrians) to get to the downtown peninsula came from precisely these outlying suburbs.


I wonder if this is because painting your face with a maple leaf or waving the flag from a hockey stick is a form of nationalism that is more available to new immigrants than the rather more insidious distanced self-regard that has hitherto characterized Canadians' sense of themselves. It is a habitus that can more easily be picked up or (better) incarnated, whatever one's background or skin color.

In any case, with the Olympic celebrations, and with the multitude that packed its thoroughfares to shout and holler, Vancouver city center felt distinctly less white than it does on a regular business day.

And it is certain that the experience of the Olympic Canada (literally) on the streets was much more multiracial than the image presented by either the opening or the closing ceremonies, both of which gave us only a tokenism towards First Nations as a flimsy cover for an otherwise overwhelmingly white and European depiction of the country. (As many have pointed out, for instance, there was no official recognition at all of Asian Canada during the opening ceremony held in this most Asian of Canadian cities.)

Almost four years ago, and while recognizing all the legitimate critiques of this over-commercialized festival brought to us by Coke and Visa, I asked "why not rescue something of the (perhaps utopian) commonality that still resides in the Olympics, rather than, inaccurately, damning them as simply another set of enclosures?"

It seems to me that we have indeed seen some of this utopian commonality in action on the streets of Vancouver over the past couple of weeks, albeit (ironically) ultimately clad in a maple-leaf flag. And we have seen both its distance from the official representation as well as the ways in which it potentially challenges, transforms, and ultimately undermines the national symbols around which it seems, superficially perhaps, to be organized.

Update: Mike Cowie says something similar about this being an Olympics on and of the streets.

Calatrava

The Saturday photo, part XI: The Milwaukee art museum at dusk.


The last rays of the wintry sun hit the museum's folding roof, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

I was in Milwaukee thanks to an invitation to speak at nearby Madison. I took the opportunity to look up old haunts (I did my MA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and stay with old friends.

In a brief tour of the city, piecing together my memories of fifteen years ago, realizing how much I had half-forgotten, and looking at what had changed, I found myself downtown and headed towards the museum.

I suddenly realized that I'd got there just in time to see the roof close. It was majestic, especially in the low sun surrounded by snow and looking over the lake. And it was also quite magical.

Haiti

[This is the text of a talk I gave at Haiti benefit at the University of British Columbia last week.]

"Haiti in Ruins"

As the TV footage and images circulated in newspapers and on the Internet attest, Haiti is in ruins. In towns near the epicenter of last week's earthquake, up to 90% of the buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The capital, Port-au-Prince, has been devastated, and where homes, offices, hospitals, and schools (and so on) have not actually collapsed, they are very often now structurally unsound. It is relatively poor consolation to observe that this has been something of an equal-opportunities disaster. The national palace was reduced to a single storey, half the UN Mission's compound was destroyed, and victims have included senators and the country's Catholic archbishop. Still, as always, it is the poor who bear the brunt, and who face the greatest challenges in the earthquake's aftermath. Hundreds of thousands are sleeping and living outside, fearful that aftershocks will bring down what precariously remains. Meanwhile, rescuers and rapid-response teams from abroad are returning home; it is very unlikely that any more survivors will emerge from the rubble. The air is filled with the stench of corpses that are buried under the debris. Ruination and decay are everywhere; the living are forced to cohabit with the dead, in a physical and social landscape scarred by destruction and haunted by the reminders of recent catastrophe.


Haitians are used to living within ruins. This is a land that has known more than its share of death and destruction. In the sixteenth century, Hispaniola's indigenous inhabitants were decimated and ultimately wiped out by the disease, malnutrition, and violence unleashed by the arrival of Spanish imperialism. As the so-called "Pearl of the Antilles" the subsequent French colony of Saint Domingue was insatiable in its demand for slaves to work in the plantations that supplied sweet sugar for European tastes: over 800,000 Africans were imported from places such as the Ivory Coast, the Congo, and what is now Ghana, Nigeria, and even Mozambique from 1680 to 1776; more had continually to be transported because the rigors of the slave system meant that over half died within eight years of arrival in the colony. More recently, for a over quarter of a century, from 1957 to 1986, Haitians had to endure the dynastic dictatorship of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude or "Baby Doc," whose feared paramilitary militia, the so-called "Tonton Macoutes," anchored a reign of terror, brutality, and corruption. The name "Tonton Macoute" is borrowed from a folkloric bogeyman, a ghostly figure said to prowl the streets after dark looking to kidnap unwary children. It is no wonder that Haitian popular beliefs and religious practices (not least the African-inspired hybrid "voodoo" or vodou) are so concerned with the presence of death in life and life in death. It is easy to believe in zombies in Haiti, surrounded by the reminders of a violent past, a ruined present, and a precarious future.

Yet to view Haitian history in this light is all too often to imagine a land defined by its perpetual victimhood. Hence the constant references today to the commonplace that this is the poorest country in the hemisphere, and the appeal for compassion, to come to its citizens' aid. Yes, we should certainly do all we can to help Haiti, and now more than ever. But not out of some kind of sympathy towards the weak and helpless at the fringes or margins of Western modernity. If anything, our relations with Haiti need to be transformed by a recognition of the country's centrality and its people's capacity and agency. For the truth is that, if we are to talk of responsibility or debt, we owe Haiti much more than Haiti can ever owe us. The country's ruins are an indication of stubborn persistence and strength, as much as they also testify to the brutality and violence that the Haitians have had to suffer.

In February last year I traveled to Cap Haitien, the country's former capital, to see some of the most extraordinary structures in the Americas, found near the now small and rather sleepy town of Milot, where the northern plain meets the mountainous interior. The Palace of Sans Souci was once the residence of Henri Christophe, who ruled as Henri I, sovereign of the independent kingdom of Northern Haiti from 1811 to 1820. It was then and still remains (even in ruins, product in part of an 1842 earthquake) a remarkable construction: built in a hybrid style influenced by a variety of European architectural traditions, it had sculptures, immense gardens, and an innovative and complex system of waterworks that functioned as a form of air conditioning. Sans Souci bears comparison with any palace or mansion in Europe or elsewhere. But the true marvel is a few miles further along. This is the building that inspired the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier to conceive the concept of the "marvelous real" that has since (in the form of "magical realism") come to define Latin America as a whole: the immense Citadelle Laferrière, the largest fortification in the Americas, which sits atop the 3,000 ft Bonnet a L’Eveque mountain that rises behind Milot to look out towards the Caribbean Sea. The Citadelle is Haiti's iconic ruin, a mainstay of national iconography and source of fascination not only for Carpentier but also for instance for the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire who would declare that Haiti was the fount of what he called négritude, which we might loosely translate as "black pride." For the Citadelle is a ruin that indicates not helplessness and victimhood, but freedom and self-reliance.

The central fact about Haiti, the reason that this is perhaps the most significant country in the Americas, even the key site for Western modernity as a whole, is not its history of disaster and suffering, but its tradition of resistance and self-affirmation. Haiti's protracted and violent revolution of 1791 to 1803 is the world's only successful slave revolt and, more importantly still, its first truly modern revolution. It was in Haiti that the principle of universal emancipation was proclaimed and won. For while the framers of the American Declaration of Independence were prepared to live, more or less uneasily, with the continued practice of slavery, and while the French defenders of the so-called rights of "man" were still debating as to whether blacks could or should count as either men or citizens, Haitian slaves took matters into their own hands and fought for the notion that freedom, if it meant anything, had to be freedom for all. Emancipation had to be universal, or it was not truly emancipation. It is for this idea, and the stubborn insistence on defending it at all costs, that we owe Haiti.

Henri Christophe's Citadelle Laferrière, then, is a reminder of the tenacity with which Haitians held on to their revolutionary achievement. Built, not without controversy (it was perhaps not the only or the best way to go about things) and at immense sacrificial labor (every stone, every cannon, every cannon ball had to be hauled up the mountain), the castle was to be the ultimate redoubt and defence should the French return once more to attempt to re-establish slavery. For Napoleon had indeed in 1801 already sent out an expedition in the charge of his brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, determined to recapture what had been by far the richest of all of France's colonial possessions. It was then that Christophe had shown he was prepared to set Cap Haitien on fire (by way of example, he torched his own home first) rather than give the French any satisfaction or allow any return to the status quo ante. Sometimes, Christophe seemed to suggest, a ruin or two was the price one paid for a greater principle. So ruination does not always mean defeat: it can also invoke resistance (what is a ruin after all but what persists, despite everything?); it can be the positive product of a people taking history into their own hands, rather than simply the negative sign of yet another historic defeat.

None of this is to say that we should somehow perversely celebrate the latest ruins that litter Port-au-Prince and southern Haiti. Nor, far from it, that we should take Haitians' historic self-reliance as an excuse not to help out now in their time of need. Haiti has been forced to go it alone too often, for instance during the nineteenth century when the United States and European powers long refused to recognize its independence, and France eventually did so only at the price of a massive indemnity that crippled the country's economy with effects that continue into the present. Even worse have been the forms of intervention premised on either condescension or fear: the last thing that Haiti needs is yet another military occupation, and it is simply shocking how in recent days the situation of the masses in the devastated slums of Port-au-Prince has been framed as a security issue first and a humanitarian crisis only secondarily. To turn our backs on Haiti or to view it as a problem is to repeat the age-old ideology that can acknowledge only in distorted form the fact that Haiti poses a radical alternative within modernity: the novel but surely incontrovertible notion that a benefit for some should also be a benefit for all. Indeed, Haiti and its ruins teach us that if we refuse to share a benefit universally, without prejudice of race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation (and so on), then it is not a benefit but a privilege whose raison d'être is exclusion. We should help Haitians now not because they need us, but because we need them.

partisan

I've long been fascinated by the FMLN's November 1989 "Final Offensive" (click here for a sequence of photos) and particularly by the incident in the Sheraton Hotel (for which see this image, by Jeremy Bigwood, which will be included in the book).

Here, a small band of guerrillas made their way into Escalón, San Salvador's most exclusive neighborhood, took over what was then (with the Camino Real) one of the city's two top luxury hotels, and so also effectively took hostage a group of US green berets, "dressed in pajamas and bulletproof vests", who so happened to be staying there at the time. (The Secretary General of the OAS, João Baena Soares, was also caught up in the action.)

I remember following events in the British papers at the time, as it caught the eye of the international press much more than the guerrillas' control of the working-class barrios where the insurrection had started. See Time's contemporaneous account, which focuses on the possibility that for the first time the US military would be directly involved in the civil war. And as Time also points out, there was something carnivalesque about the whole affair:

Despite the tension, the scene became like something from a TV situation comedy, with the rebels enjoying a feast of hotel food and the U.S. soldiers resolutely glowering from behind their barricades.

But it always seemed to me that there was more to the incident than its value as some kind of spectacular publicity stunt in the middle of an uprising that eventually ended in stalemate. It was a digression, but an important one.

I've discussed the Sheraton incident before, and also recounted something of a visit two years ago in which I stayed in a Sheraton, if not (it turned out) "the" Sheraton.

In Posthegemony, I deal with the Salvadoran civil war, and particularly the capture of the Sheraton, at some length. I try, among other things, to argue that this brief episode is in fact significant in broader world-historical terms. As I put it there:

The Salvadoran civil war was part of a broader, global transition. [. . .] As the guerrilla forces quietly slipped away from the scene, and as the fighting across the country began to subside, on the other side of the world the Cold War was ending. The FMLN offensive had taken place in the brief interlude between the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, and the first Eastern European Communist regime to collapse (in Czechoslovakia) on November 24. The November offensive ("in all probability, the biggest guerrilla offensive ever mounted against a Latin American government"), and particularly the incident in the Sheraton with which it ended, was a hinge: both the last confrontation of the Cold War era, and the first post-Cold War conflict, a premonition of future actions against tall buildings. [. . .] Perhaps, then, San Salvador provided a better indication then Berlin or Prague of how the world would soon look. For all the euphoria of the border-breaching and deterritorialization in Eastern and Central Europe, Central America offered a clearer index of the low-intensity fear and control societies emerging from the shell of Cold War ideological tussles.

In the book's overall argument, however, this is something of a digression. It is part of my general intuition that in some sense (almost) all of modern history starts in Latin America. This is my rejoinder to the self-confidence of someone like Henry Kissinger who, in 1969, declared to the Chilean foreign minister of the time:

Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You're wasting your time.

By contrast, I like to say that everything of importance comes from the South: modernity, the industrial revolution, nationalism, neoliberalism... and so on and so forth. The only exception is liberal democracy, but then how important is that, anyway?

Of course, in many ways this argument is simply intended as a provocation. It's a useful corrective to unthinking Eurocentrism, modeled on and extending some of the provocations initially put forward for instance by dependency theory, but the very idea of an "axis of history" is itself rather dubious. Rather, in almost every case phenomena such as modernity or neoliberalism arise in a complex series of interactions, complicities, encounters, and struggles that involve both North and South. And more dependency theory itself, while emphasizing the importance of (say) the mines of Potosí for the development of industrial capitalism, also shows that it is the interaction of (what it calls) "center" and "periphery" that counts. Indeed, in the end the very distinction between center and periphery, North and South, becomes ultimately tenuous.

Hence my suggestion that the Final Offensive is a "hinge" and a "premonition of future actions against tall buildings" is a digression: perhaps (again) an important one, but ultimately not crucial to the main argument. I want rather to establish resonances between the Central American guerrilla and contemporary terrorism, mostly through a phenomenology of terrorist affect, and the ways in which it undermines both liberal and conservative conceptions of the state. Any sense of historical causality or origin is by the by. After all, there were plenty of other things going on in Latin America in that fateful year, not least for instance the Venezuelan Caracazo.

And yet... I continue to have the sense that there is something particularly interesting about the Final Offensive. And now, reading Carl Schmitt's Theory of the Partisan, I feel I have more of an idea as to why that might be. In short, November 1989 demonstrated the final crisis of the figure (or, in Schitt's terms, the "theory") of the partisan. It is here that we see definitively the arrival of "unexpected new forms of the new partisan" with all the implications that has for "the concept of the political, [. . .] the question of the real enemy and of a new nomos of the earth" (Schmitt, 95).

But enough for today. More on this, probably, tomorrow.

Winnipeg

While I'm at it... I am coming to believe that Winnipeg is in fact the site of the "real" Canada.

This makes sense on so many levels. It's the geographic center of the country, after all. It also has a prairie. And clearly British Columbia, for instance, isn't Canada (too mild). Nor is Toronto or the rest of Ontario (too much like the USA). Quebec is, well, a case apart. Calgary is a weird bit of Texas transplanted to northern climes. And the Maritimes are too far away from anything. Newfoundland is a lost rock in the Atlantic Ocean, that only joined the Confederation when forced to do so. The Territories are empty and barren. No, only Saskatchewan comes close. But Manitoba, I think, is like Saskatchewan only more so.

So in the same way that the Weakerthans are really singing about Canada when they declare their hate for their native city, so surely Guy Maddin's marvellous movie My Winnipeg should similarly be read allegorically, as a film about the best and the worst that this country could be and is.

It's a mesmerizing, magnificent film, deeply strange and troubled, which is loosely premised on the film-maker's eternally ill-fated attempt to leave this place in which everyone is strangely half-asleep.

My Winnipeg is also a lament. And after all, if Canada has an identity, it involves a lament for an identity is now lost, and was never recognized at the time; Canada's identity is permanently après coup, as Lacan would say. (This is also the theme of Douglas Coupland's Souvenir of Canada, as I've hinted before, in not dissimilar circumstances.) Specifically, Maddin's lament revolves around the demolition of the Jets' stadium, and so the departure of major league hockey from the town.

And (forgive the spoiler) the film ends with the most astonishing vision of some kind of prairie socialist realist goddess reversing the flow of time and conjuring the stadium back from the rubble. It's an amazing finale, and well worth the occasional longeur en route.

Anyhow, here's the trailer...

Weakerthan

Smug liberality is one of Canada's less endearing traits. Some (too much) of that was on display yesterday at an event I attended that went under the title of a "Foreign Policy Camp" organized by something called Canada's World. The basic impulse was to ask how Canada could lead the world, as it was apparently born to do, by spreading its fine liberal values to the less fortunate mass of humanity who sadly live elsewhere on the globe.

I participated in person (with a call for Open Borders that went down surprisingly well), but some of the discussion can be found on twitter. In the fray, I seem to have started a bit of an argument with one of Canada's best and brightest after she was quoted as saying that the influence of "diaspora communities" made the country "vulnerable". Oh well.

(And yes, those who are so minded can follow me on Twitter here.)

I also, incidentally, got to meet up with my old buddy and sparring partner Carlo Dade, who mentioned what to me is the astonishing fact that immigration has never yet been on the agenda of the Summit of the Americas.

Anyhow, I happily admit to having an ambivalent relationship to Canada. But increasingly I come to discover that such ambivalence is itself rather Canadian... and in so far as it can be considered a potential antidote to the temptation to smugness, it is one of the country's virtues.

Perhaps the same fundamental insecurity drives the smugness, too. But far better for it to be articulated as openness to others, and a willingness not to tout "Canadian values" but to rethink them. For indeed, this country is far more hospitable to others than many. And, for instance, fear-mongering against immigrants has yet to make great inroads here, unlike (say) in the UK or the US.

But all this is prelude to the following video, which I was indirectly recommended by a guy, Gord McIntyre, whom I first met twenty years ago, at a very difficult moment, in Guatemala, when we were both attached to a human rights NGO in Santa Cruz de Quiché. (It was that experience that first really made me doubt the whole discourse of human rights, by the way.)

Recently Gord got back in touch, and it turns out he now lives in Winnipeg. He suggested I might like one of that city's local bands, the Weakerthans, and I find that they wrote this marvellous song that encapsulates something of Canada's virtuous ambivalence and self-doubt. Long may it continue thus. And long may Canada continue "weaker than" it would rather be.


To put this another way: let us all hate Canada in exactly the same way as the Weakerthans hate Winnipeg.