Philosophy.Com

welcoming the other

In the light of mandatory detention and the way that Australia locks up, asylum seekers and refugees as the bearers of human rights, the insight of Emmanual Levinas makes sense: the core of the ethical relation is constituted by the welcoming of the other.

Sean Leahy,

I knew that Levinas breaks with Heidegger's phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. Ethics transgresses the liberal centering on the self-relation and its various forms, and centres on the relation with the other.

This is a return to the lived experience of a primordial "face-to-face" or person-to-person encounter, whilst the primacy of the ethical relation provides a more adequate description of human relations in a community.

The penny drops.

Refugees, human rights, bare life

Should we place the refugee at the centre of a contemporary analysis of political life? If so, should we continue to think in terms of human rights, or the rights of a human being?

Though 'the refugee' is seen to embody the very necessity of the existence of human rights, it is these very rights that are often, and increasingly, denied to those seeking asylum in Australia from torture or death by oppressive regimes. Australia's system of mandatory, indefinite detention imprisons asylum seekers and it can lock stateless people up for the rest of their lives if need be.

In Australia the conservative state attempts to do away with the category of refugee----it is replaced by asylum seeker. With this shift the obvious bearer of human rights, and a prime candidate for the protection of human rights, is excluded from the meaning and enactment of 'right'.

As they are classified as "queue jumpers", asylum seekers are deemed to be 'illegal'. They do not warrant being seen in terms of their human rights as it is an issue of border protection and threats to Australia's national sovereignty. These non-citizens can be subject to a regime of incarceraton; they warrant the severe deprivation of their physical liberty; and are subject to solitary confinement.

Human rights have been displaced, even though some are eventually granted refugee status. What are the latter' status? Temporary resident non-citizens?

If they are denied their rights as refugees and citizen rights, then this denial casts the refugees into a situation of statelessness:they are cut off from their own State's protection and they without the rights of the State in which they are tempotarily resident. They live in a shadow land.

So argue those who defend human rights. But maybe we should question the use of human rights? In her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1958) Hannah Arendt's says that the problem with human rights is that they are invoked at the precise moment at which the rights of a citizen, the political artifice that bestows human dignity, are stripped away. This leaves us with "the abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human"--- a condition that, despite the best-intentioned humanitarianism and the loquacious declarations of human rights, is seen by her as essentially "worthless" (1958:297).

The calamity of human rights is registered for Arendt by the appearance of what is bare life in Agamben's sense. Bare life is not the same as natural life, but is to be understood as the result of an unavoidable political power that blurs the distinction between political and natural. For Arendt bare life is represented as reducing human beings to mere "savages" or "animals." Agamben argues for a need to work through the distinction between working through of the distinction between bios (natural life) and zoe (political life) or nature and culture, rather than following Arendt in reaffirming zoe and accepting the duality.

Agamben's working through gives us the juridico-political category of 'bare life.' Bare life is not natural life, as bare life is what, in view, is produced as the originary (both original and originating) act of sovereignty. The production of this bare life thus establishes a relation that defines the political realm and which Agamben calls, the relation of ban, or abandonment. So 'bare life' is produced in and through this fundamental act of sovereignty in the sense of being included in the political realm precisely by virtue of being excluded.

The asylum seeker in the detention camp in Australia is included the political realm of the liberal constitutional state by virtue of being exlcuded by being incarcerated in the camp.

neo-liberalism+welfare to work reform

I read Peter Saunders new book Australia's Welfare Habit and how to kick it whilst travelling to and from Canberra in the last couple of weeks. The book is usefully summarized in this article at the Brisbane Institute's online magazine. It indicates the way the social welfare state that we have grown up is now giving way to the enabling state.

Saunders is a market liberal and the primary reason behind his push for the reform of the welfare state is a small government philosophy. This classic liberalism limits the reach of central government so as to expand individual choice, freedom and opportunity. This presupposes that individuals should be able to take care of themselves; and, given this self-reliance, the proportion of the population needing federal welfare and health assistance should fall. If individuals and families assume more responsibility for their own welfare and employment, then the nanny state can be wound back, if not abolished.

Peter Saunders states that there are two reasons for reducing welfare dependency rates and return more people to economic self-reliance. The first is that:

"...income support is now costing taxpayers $80 billion per year. This expense is a key factor keeping taxes high, even on workers with modest incomes, with the result that work incentives and rewards for effort get eroded. Indeed, we are chasing our tails, for as we increase taxation to meet the growing cost of income support payments, so it becomes less attractive to work, and more people seek welfare as an alternative."

The second reason is that:

"... long periods on welfare corrode people's work skills, destroy their habit of self-reliance and undermine their wellbeing. Children raised in welfare-dependent families perform worse than they should in school, are more likely to end up in trouble with the law, and have a higher probability of winding up on benefits themselves. In short, having one in six of our working-age adults depending on benefits as their main or sole source of income is bad for those who have to support them and is bad for the recipients themselves."

What we have is an argument for a neo-liberal mode of governance. According to this political rationality the state is responsible for law and order; the market is responsible for promoting self-reliance and enterprise; the conduct and subjectivity of individuals needs to be shaped so they become more self-reliant.

Saunders spells out the three ways this neo-liberal political rationlaity will achieve its new market order.

"First, we need labour market reform to create more jobs for people now on welfare...This is why proposed changes to the award system and the unfair dismissal laws are so important, for these reforms will have their biggest impact on the supply of lower-paid jobs...Given the choice between a low-paid job and no job at all, there should be no question which is preferable."

Mark Banisch has comments on this reform over at Larvatus Prodeo.

The second way is welfare reform

"..so that long-term income support recipients who are capable of working are encouraged or required to get off benefits and into employment. This is where recent government proposals to reform Disability Support Pension (DSP) and Parenting Payments are so crucial, for these are two of the main benefit categories which have been expanding rapidly in recent times."

However, welfare reform is not enough.The third leg in the reform triangle is:

"...tax reform, for in addition to ensuring jobs are available, and that people on welfare will apply for them, we also have to ensure that when people do work they are properly rewarded. This is not the case at the moment, particularly at the bottom end of income distribution, for workers are penalized heavily when they increase their incomes through a combination of high taxation and withdrawal of means tested benefits."

Saunders says that the Howard Government Labour is committed to market reform to generate more jobs; is interested in welfare reform to get more people into work; and is largely indifferent to tax reform to make it worthwhile working.

Many in Australia interpret this neo-liberal mode of governance as a return to 19th century laissez-faire liberalism as it represents a loosening or freeing of an existing set of market relations from the social shackles of the welfare state. However, the neo-liberal mode of governance goes further than this, as it more of all aspects of social conduct being reconceptualized along economic lines----as calculative actions governed by instrumental reason of self-reliant and enterprising subjects, which are undertaken through the execise of choice to achieve wealth maximisation.

The key figure here, and one which differentiates the new economic subject from the old one, is 'enterprising' or 'entreprenurial. 'We are entrepreneurs of ourselves as our conduct is now being shaped so that we are disciplined into the business of caring for ourselves. We are now increasingly obliged to make adequate provision for the preservation, reproduction and reconstruction of our own human capital.

blogging, political events, meaning

This quote below is from Glenn Fuller's 'The Eventual Potential of Blogs' paper, which was given at the recent BlogTalk Downunder conference.

"What we would see from the traditional media institutions is reportage on the historical event producing the media-event which enables and frames discussion. Arguably what is produced by bloggers is discussion that enables and frames the event."

That claim is too strong for Australia.

The discussions produced by bloggers at a federal election event often works within the way it has been framed by the corporate media as a two horse race. Few bloggers challenge that framing, and if they do, it is largely ignored by the corporate media and many online readers who continue to think in terms of a horse race. Far from framing the event the bloggers are whistling in the dark, even if they can generate a lot of online discussion.

Fuller quotes from a Paul Patton paper entitled 'The World Seen from Within: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Events' to support his claim. Patton says:

"While social events have always been constituted in part by the manner in which they were represented or described, the speed of modern telecommunications has undoubtedly accelerated the feedback loop between decisions, their perceived consequences and the public reactions to those perceived consequences. It is not plausible to claim that events are reducible to their representations, but it is equally implausible to claim that events and their representations are entirely distinct from one another." Theory and Event(1.1, 1997, n.p.)

Well yes, that is true. You can see the speed of the feedback loop in the way the Howard Government's mandatory detention policy has been unravelling of late. It is changing because the events around this policy are encoded with political meanings, and the Howard Government's political responses (eg. to allow mothers and new born babies to stay ouside the camps) are a reaction to those meanings.

The Howard Government understands that it has to appear to be compassionate and humane in terms of its administration of mandatory detention.This is illustrated by the release of Malaysian woman Virginia Leong and her three-year-old daughter Naomi, born in Sydney's Villawood detention centre.

Bloggers had no role in any of this. This was largely done through the ALP Senators digging away at DIMA at Senate Estimates, the media running with the comments, the PM's office seeing how the politics was playing against them, and then responding. Where were the bloggers? Nowhere. We don't make the news. Nor do we enframe it.

In Australia political bloggers mostly reflect on the significance of what has happened after the event. They do so by contesting different interpretations of the meaning or significance of that event.

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blogging and politics

Weblogs and the networks formed by bloggers are now a integral part of online culture and the information superhighways of communicative capitalism. The webloggers are Web travelers by necessity.

So what is the extent and impact of blogging in political life in Australia?

What is clear to me is that blogs have not replaced the institutional and ideological functions of the old corporate media. Nor do they primarily filter news about a specific topic to an interested audience. The role of bloggers in the selection and therefore initial construction of political events as news is severely limited. But they--the issue related blogs---can and do intervene in the production of the meaning of political events in the form of an op.ed commentary. They are a part of the excess of meaning around political events.

These forms of personal publishing are also spaces in which to reflect on these events, and they can also provide a form of resistance to what Andrew Bartlett has called "the dismal level and nature of information about political matters available through the (increasingly narrow) mainstream media." Bartlett is dead about the dismality of the political conversation. Political tribalism-my lot is better than your lot suck boo--has a lot with that low level.

One place to turn to begin to answer the question about the extent and impact of blogging in political life is the recent BlogTalkDownunder Conference. It has come and gone and the reflections have started.

If we bounce of Andrew Bartlett's abstract at the BlogTalkDownunder Conference we can say that the strength of the issue-related blogs is that they can, and do counter the minimal diversity of opinions, the 'dumbing down' of political discourse through existing mainstream media, and the mainstream media's treatment of politics as a combination of soap opera and pseudo-sporting contest.

Hence they make a contribution to the civic dialogue. But we should not get too carried away by that contribution to debate, dissent, free speech and participatory democracy. Do the blogs strongly impact on the media, political advisors/researchers and activists? I doubt it.

What we can say is that the political weblogs in Australia have avoided mirroring the reactive, not reflective, aspects of the corporate media; and the tendency towards clusters of weblogs forming echo chambers.
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mandatory detention unravels?

When I was in Canberra today I watched some of the Senate Estimates where non Government Senators queried the actions of the Minister and the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA).

Both the Minister and Department are very much on the defensive. The tendency of DIMA has been to ignore criticism, react against it, and single out those whose case gets publicity for adverse treatment.

However, the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez have shown very clearly that reform of the mandatory detention system is politically needed. Something has to change. How far will the government go in easing the system of mandatory detention that won them the election in 2001?

Change is happening. How much? Will it go far enough to reaffirm the liberal values of basic freedoms defended by Menzies? Will the ALP affirm these principles?

I did see Bill Farmer, the Departmental Secretary of DIMA, make the following apology:

"We profoundly regret what has happened in some cases. We are intensely conscious that our day to day business affects the lives of people and it is distressing, and unacceptable, that our actions have in respects fallen so short of what we would want, and the Australian people expect. We are deeply sorry about that."

DIMA sure needed to apologize. Proper files have not been kept; crucial information has not been passed up the line; and bureaucrats have swept the dirt under the carpet. This indicated that DIMA, which has the power to lock up people indefinitely, has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to wield this power.Despite this the heads of Vanstone and Farmer will not roll.

From what I saw the Department officials continued their old habits at Estimates: they prevaricated, obfuscated and played loose with the facts and language. Not once did they, or the Minister, acknowledge that the current policies----prolonged incarceration of refugees behind barbed wire, locking up children for years, and deporting Australian citizens on the false assumption that they are illegals----trashes the Menzies tradition of liberalism. Beither had any concern about the way that basic freedoms are undermined and denied.

The political pressure continues to mount on DIMA. It was announced that the Palmer inquiry into the immigration fiasco has suddenly grown exponentially to cover more than 200 people in detention, even though they are lawfully entitled to be in Australia. The head of the inquiry, the former federal police commissioner Mick Palmer, will not take on the extra load:-he has recommended that his investigation be handed over to a judicial power, such as the Commonwealth Ombudsman.

This indicates that a ham-fisted, out of control, and anything goes DIMA is becoming a political liability. The coupling of its harsh treatment of children and mothers and its dirty linen will be a potential source of political embarrassment and scandal in the months ahead. Even so heads will not roll, as mandatory detention will remain locked in. Howard and Ruddock are the two architects of mandatory detention and the rheotric of the 2001 election campaign launch about "we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come". They gave DIMA the signal that a tough approach to refugeees and asylum seekers was not just acceptable but imperative.

These two architects are immune and they have ensured that Amanda Vanstone is left holding the poisoned chalice. It is probable that a "can-do DIMIA" will be finally forced to become "user-friendly" and treat detainees and critics with greater care. However, nothing is said about the dumping of the Menzies liberal tradition by the conservatives, or the trashing of the rule of law.

At the moment everybody is now trying to look compassionate and pressure DIMA to change its anything goes cowboy culture. That is the Howard Government's strategy. Will this political strategy work?

Consider The Age's good editorial on mandatory detention. It says that what has gone wrong:

"...is not simply a case of overly harsh application of policies - although the Government's repeated public condemnations of "illegal immigrants" certainly set the tone. The policies themselves are harsh and wrong, as Mr Georgiou's bill recognises. Ms Vanstone's confirmation of more than 200 cases of possible wrongful detention is part of an emerging picture of a profoundly flawed system, which strengthens the case for an open, independent judicial inquiry."

That is spot on. Howard and Ruddock called the shots on this. They own mandatory detention, even though it was introduced by lefty Ministers in the Keating Government. The open breaching of habeas corpus--incarceration of those who have committed no crime inside barbed wire camps---is the legacy of Howard and Ruddock.

However, Petro Georgio's private member's bill aimed at modifying mandatory detention, won't pass despite widespread concerns about DIMIA. There is no chance that Liberals will defy Howard on a policy that has been politically exploited so successfully.

Now The Age calls for the end of mandatory detention system:

"The ostensible justification for mandatory detention is that it is a deterrent, but this practical justification was always arguable. It makes little sense now that the boats have all but stopped, while the case against the policy is stronger than ever. Liberal MP Judi Moylan, who supports Mr Georgiou, this week summed up the policy's moral inconsistencies: "What are we doing locking up people who are innocent to set some sort of example to people smugglers in another country?" Asylum seeking is not a crime, but an internationally recognised human right. Mandatory detention should be abandoned."

That puts the finger squarely on the issue.

It is true that the policy of mandatory detention is beginning to unravel, and attempts are being made to make it more compassionate or humane. However, only a minority of Australians support The Age's call for the abandonment of mandatory detention.

The ALP, for instance, says that it will continue to support mandatory detention. So there is bi-partisan consensus on the basic policy. The ALP appears to assume that many of the asylum-seekers Australia has let in are not really refugees, and so should be shipped back to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hence it will continue to support policies that put "queue jumpers" in the detention camps, but oppose DIMA's tendency to incarcerate children in the barbed wire camps; or grab people who seem a bit odd and can't find their passports, throw them in jail, and then abuse them.

A lot of cracks are going to be needed for the walls of mandatory detention in Australia start to crumble.

the camp

The photo below is of a child riding a trike at the Woomera Detention Centre in South Australia:

The detention camp is a place where the refugees are not free to communicate with the outside world that can only assemble at the perimeters of their prison in the desert.

Kids should not belong in detention centres. Many Australian citizens would hold that.

Yet we have the mandatory immigration detention of children in Australia despite it being widely accepted in the national community that children held in immigration detention for long periods of time are at a high risk of suffering from serious mental harm.

The Commonwealth's failure to implement the repeated recommendations by mental health professionals that certain children be removed from the detention environment with their parents amounts to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of those children in detention.

"How can I describe this place? It is a place where no human being can ever forget. A place full of agony, deprivation, despair and sorrow. Everyone that came to me at Port Hedland said I deserved to suffer because I chose Australia as a country of freedom to live. Australia for me is a country of torture".

Miriam. Samira, Amal, Mariam, Amani and Paula Abood, "Seeing Through the Darkness: Testimonials of Refugee Women", presented at the forum Imprison and Detain: Racialised Punishment in Australia Today, University of Technology in Sydney on 24 May 2001.(The above names are fictitious to protect the futures of the women who have spoken of the trauma and abuse they have experienced, whilst being falsely imprisoned because they have sought asylum in Australia).

The Australian security state's legislation produces the violence and barbarism that it proclaims to abhor. The very legislative acts and practices that incarcerate the refugee and asylum seeker produce a violation of the rights of the refugee and asylum seeker: Our border protection says that there is no refuge or asylum for you who flee trauma, war and hostile oppressive states.

Are children in the detention camps another example of the figure of homo sacer?

violence

The terrible violence of colonialism.

Can one say that indigenous Australian populations--seen as nonreligious, indolent and idle, hideous and uncivilized cannibals in the late enlightenment period be represented as an image of a "creature" that is utterly rejected and excluded from humanity? One who lives in the 'unlivable' and 'uninhabitable' zones of social life and can be seen as a homo sacer in Giorgio Agamben's sense.

If homo sacer denotes a naked or bare life that is depoliticized, and exempt or excluded from the normal limits of the state. At the same time, then the idigenous people as homo sacer are not simply cast out but are held in particular relation to the norm: it is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm exists.

politics of child welfare

Interesting In the conclusion to his paper on the politics of child welfare under settler-colonialism Robert van Krieken says that:

"Liberal social policy and practice rests on a delicate balance between individual rights and some conception of 'the social', between the particular and the universal, and the way this balance is struck is central to the distinctions between differing forms of liberalism. The more that the history of liberalism's 'past wrongs' reveals various aspects of its underlying despotism, the more it seems that there is in fact a powerful tension at its heart between 'welfare' and 'government', and that if we simply assume that the two work in harmony, the former will tend to be defined in terms of the latter."

The past wrongs refer to the violence wrought on the indigenous people in the namer of welfare because they were seen as a brake on modernity. Aboriginality was not seen as a part of modernity. So part-Aboriginal children-- half-caste children---were taken from their indigneous mothers and bought up white to prevent their descent into barbarism and moral depravity.

That mode of governance is an assimilationist one.

in Sydney

I'm in Sydney for the weekend for some meetings and a new job. I had the afternoon free so I checked out Glebe Books and Fish Records. I'm currently working from an internet cafe in Glebe. However, the internet cafe broadband connection is very slow. I'm really only checking in as the computer keeps on freezing up.

Glebe Books had no texts by Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben in their politics section. It was very disappointing. So I bought Nicolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought(1998), a text about reframing political thought towards neo-liberal governmentality.

Something to read in the meantime.

refugees: opening the doors?

I'm on the road to Sydney today. I will try and post latter if I can find an internet connection. Meantime:

Cathy Wilcox

That is Amanda Vanstone, the Minister of Immigration, who has inherited the Howard Government's policy of mandatory and indefinite detention of unauthorised asylum seekers. Six years ago the policy rhetoric was based around the threat of boat people overrunning Australia words, with words such as 'illegal', 'detainee', 'riot', 'people smuggler', and 'queue jumper' being used. Australia was not going to be a soft touch for people smugglers. So we had tough screening to reject people by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA). They saw their job to defend the Minister and the Government and to only provide the most minimal of material to Parliament. DIMA thumbed its nose at democracy.

Mandatory detention with its Pacific Solution detention camps in Nauru continues to remain central to the effective border protection policy of the national security state. Mandatory detention and the camps remain in place, even though the people-smuggling trade has eased, and there is evidence of the harmful effects of long-term detention. The Government sees that it owed its political success to the policy and it would not be changing it.

Minister Vanstone is beginning to challenge her bureaucrats to be more open to public criticism of their decisions. According to news reports, she told them they had to be prepared to change their defensive policy and practice, particularly in difficult cases, such as those involving wrongly detained Australian citizens, such as Vivian Alvarez Solon and Cornelia Rau.

Does this represent the start of a shift in departmental culture?

It is an unusual step as it is not the Minister just blaming her department or staff. A political shift is under way. It can be discerned in the way the Minister has been gradually relaxing of some of the previous Minister's (Phillip Ruddock) tough immigration policy decisions.

The next step is to respond to criticisms about the detention of asylum seekers and acknowledge that such policies stand in marked contrast to the rhetoric about supporting the global struggle for freedom. Or is freedom abroad and unfreedom for refugees and detainees at home? The mandatory detention system is based on the violation of the right to liberty. Cornelia Rau was an Australian, suffers from a mental illness, and she was detained legally.

That step would mean aiming to release long-term detainees and women and children from immigration detention, and to give permanent protection to refugees who come by boat.

Update: 24 May 2001
An example of the doors opening with respect to those who have become stateless. The rhetoric today is becoming more personal and compassionate with words such as victim, mother, sister, children being used and names being attached to the words: Corneila Rau, Vivian Alvarez Solon, Naomi Lweong.

Little Australia: a parody of history

This is critical of Australia's foreign minister. I'll never forget him encouraging Indonesia to bomb the Kimberleys during the federal election to justify his neo-con foreign policy.

Geoff Pryor

What we have is Alexander Downer's Earl Page speech given at The University of New England, Armidale. He says:

"In a time when bipartisanship was imperative in Australia in the national interest, Curtin had chosen from 1935 on to placate the international socialists, pacifists and anti-conscriptionists within his own party.... Curtin's leadership of his party in the crises that preceded it was characteristic of the Lefts approach to international politics. Labor's policy in response to the Italian invasion was that it would not support sanctions and "the control of Abyssinia by any country is not worth the loss of a single Australian life".

Defending that policy, he began the long Labor tradition of wringing his hands over a Little Australia incapable of playing anything more than a minor role internationally: "Australia is but a minor power; it is a small nation, remote from the great centres of international civilization....we must have regard to our position, to our circumstances, to the place we hold in the geography of the world and to what we are capable of doing towards the maintenance of the peace of the worl....Australia should not resort to warlike acts against any other nation."

That Little Australia account (a small country in a world of giants) is a rewriting of Australian history. It ignores the way that the conservatives (eg.,Robert Menzies) were subservient to the imperial power of the UK and went along with the UK's foreign policy. It was Curtin who said no to Churchill around 1942.

It also ignores that, from H.V. Evatt and Arthur Calwell through to Bob Hawke and Keating, Labor leaders have sought to reconcile Australian dependence on its closest allies (first the UK then the US) with a measure of independence and international co-operation. It was a balancing act not a policy of appeasment.

Alexander Downer appears to think that Australia can, and should, walk the international stage as if it were a considerable power not a middling one. That can hardly be called a realpolitik view of international relations. It expresses a desire, a dream, a vision, an imagining, not realpolitik.

populism contra liberalism.

One blockage to the renewal of social democracy in Australia is the conservative populist assault on liberalism and the difficulty liberals experience in confronting the resonance of the culture war amongst working-class people.

On the backlash account of conservative populism the ordinary hard working Australian worker understands that that the arrogant elitist social liberals aren't the friends of ordinary mainstream people, but the enemy. This is interpreted as the ALP having deserted them by swinging too far to the left, and embracing the policies and values of the inner-city, cafe latte crowd.

This politics as culture and class has become the very blood and bone of public discourse since 1996. A lot of the strategy and script is derived from the US, where conservatives approaches politics not as a defender of the existing order but as an average working person offended by the arrogance of the (liberal) elites. As Thomas Frank explains:

"The sensibility was perfectly caught during the campaign by onetime Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer, who explained it to The New York Times like this: "Joe Six-Pack doesn't understand why the world and his culture are changing and why he doesn't have a say in it."[3] These are powerful words, the sort of phrase that could once have been a slogan of the fighting, egalitarian left. Today, though, it was conservatives who claimed to be fighting for the little guy, assailing the powerful, and shrieking in outrage at the direction in which the world is irresistibly sliding."

Frank says that the backlash narrative is more powerful than mere facts, and according to this central mythology conservatives are always hardworking patriots who love their country and are persecuted for it, while liberals, who are either high-born weaklings or eggheads hypnotized by some fancy idea, are always ready to sell their nation out at a moment's notice.It was that narrative that Murdoch's papers pushed in Australia during the Iraq war, the war on terrorism and on national security.

The effect is to dislodge the blue collar working class from social democracy and the ALP.

renewing social democracy?

These are conservative times we live in, as we learn to come to grips with the impact of living in a global economy, the effects of the culture wars, and the decay of liberalism. These are big changes working themselves out behind our backs and they are transforming the political landscape.

In Australia, you can see the conservatism of the times illustrated by the difficulties the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is encountering in regaining the Treasury benches. David Burchell has an op. ed. in Saturday's Australian Financial Review (subscription required) about the decline in the ALP's percentage of the primary vote. Burchill says:

"From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Labor's percentage share of the primary vote hovered around the mid-40s. But in the 1996 election it dipped below 40 per cvent and, aside from a brief rally in 1998, has been falling ever since. It's now heading into the mid-30s. This is territory modern Labor has never occupied before. If the trend continues, Labor could cease to be a viable alternative government."

It is not just the ALP vote. The Labor electoral brand is also in trouble as a decreasing number of Australians say that the ALP best represents their views on issues other than the core ones of health, education and enviornment. Burchill says:

'In 2001 and 2004 alike, a mere 27 per cent of respondents identified with Labor as "best representing their views". In other words, little more than quarter of the electorate identifies with what they think of as Labor values. In contrast, almost 44 per cent of respondents now believe that one or other of the coalition parties best represents their views. You could say the ALP is undergoing a crisis of relevance.'

Burchill says the ALP is primarily seen as a big-hearted party of social assistance but little else, whilst its stress on infrastructure rebuilding and skills and training is a slender platform for renewal.

Where to for renewal?

Burchill says that:

"Labor clearly needs to give voters positive reasons to vote for it. Purely defensive commitments to the survival of quality public schooling and public health are not enough---nor is a largely "me-too" approach to economic policy."

The ALP does appear to be locked into a defence of the old welfare state even though Mark Latham, its previous leader, tried to break new ground with his Third Way. Burchill makes some suggestions to what is needed:

"To generate a sense of relevance, Labor needs not just a defence-of-public schooling policy but innovative strategies for quality schooling. It needs not just a policy on hospitals and pharmaceuticals but a general strategy on health improvement and "wellness."'It needs to find creative approaches to welfare and employment that encourage independence and self-reliance, rather than simply reinforcing a now descredited and unpopular culture of welfare dependence."

I reckon that is the right pathway and one that the ALP had started to walk along.

Agamben, exception, homo sacer, refugees

Agamben argues that the place of sovereignty is on the threshold between what lies both inside and outside the law: life. He proposes that 'exception' can be interpretated as an originary structure where law exists by virtue of the exception it captures in itself---life--- in the sense that life 'can in the last instance be implicated in the sphere of law only through the presupposition of its inclusive exclusion, only in an exceptio.' [16]

So we cannot definitively claim that the exception is either outside or inside the law. The exceptions, such as refugees or those interned in detention facilities have simply been abandoned: they are both inside and outside the law. This exception is Agamben's homo sacer. These people can be killed but the killing of them is neither a sacrifice, in the sense that they are not divine, nor murder, in that no law is broken. Why? Because they exist in the space between zoe and bios.

Detention, refugees, homo sacer

The national security state presupposes strict border controls, mandatory detention of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, a network of privately run mandatory detention camps, and the camps being run on prison lines. This system and governance is premised on saying no to the movement of illegal migration into Australia, cutting the flow of asylum seekers, and dealing with the asylum seekers in terms of punitive crime and punishment regime. The history of the resistance to immigration in Australia is a long, grim and powerful in this country -- it is a history of legal constraint, of walls descending, of bitter prejudice, racism and vigilantism.

Matt Golding

Some in Australia are now questioning the way the Department of Immigration (DIMIA) goes about stopping the traffic; the way it governs those imprisoned and the way it deports those stateless people it has classified as illegal immigrants. Many liberals are uncomfortable with the harshness of the regime and the cowboy culture of DIMIA. The illegal alien is abstractly defined as something of a specter (of terrorism) a body stripped of individual personage with no rights whose very presence on the edge of Australia's borders is troubling.

Can we frame the detention of illegal migrants (aliens) as a way to understand politics and how notions of political participation, sovereignty and the politiical "form of life" in western liberal democracies?

Is Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, which denotes a naked or bare life that is depoliticized, and exempt or excluded from the normal limits of the state. Does it indicate that it is through the exclusion of the depoliticized form of life that the politicized norm exists?

As we have seen Agamben uses Schmitt's conception of the state of exception to argue that the state of exception is born out of law suspending itself, a law that continues in relation to the state of exception announced by the sovereign. It is not that the exception is included through interdiction in that which includes it (law); rather it is 'included solely through its exclusion'–- to which Agamben coins the phrase: 'relation of exception.'

Hence, the exception is neither a fact nor a juridical case since it came into being only because of a suspension of the law. Here the crucial point is that the relation of exception is one of a 'ban.' Agamben says: 'He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside become indistinguishable.'

letting things be#2

Here's a bit of a challenge from Freya Mathews:

"Faced with the devastating environmental and social impacts of corporate capitalism and contemporary global markets, the advocate of letting-be might search for the essence of capitalism and find it in the liberal tenet of freedom---the right of everyone to pursue their own good in their own way subject only to a minimal requirement that their doing so not extinguish the like right of others. She notices the isomorphism between this principle of freedom and her own principle of letting-be. Instead of opposing this freedom, out of disgust for the havoc it wreaks on the environment and on the fabric of society, she expands its scope: truly to follow through on liberalism, she points out, is to let everything, human and other-than-human alike, work out its own good in its own way--in other words, to let everything be. How is she to convince liberals that not only human beings but all things are entitled to work out their own good in their own way? She will have to persuade them to change their metaphysical premise. And how is she to accomplish this? By couching her argument within her opponents' terms of reference. If, as is generally the case, liberals' terms of reference are rationalist, then she must demonstrate rationally that a change of metaphysical premise is needed. She must out-reason, out-argue, the proponents of reason and argument."

Freya Mathews, Letting the World Do the Doing. Letting things be is a different ethos to that of making things letter through control and domination that characterises the instrumental reason of modernity.

letting things be

I've been in budget lockup all afternoon and I'm just too tired to post. So have a read of this paper by Freya Mathews. It is opportune since the environment did not figure all that strongly in the federal budget. In fact it was never mentioned in the Treasurer's speech, even though the economy depends, and impacts, upon natural processes.

Mathews says:

"The trap for environmentalists, in thinking about nature, is to reify it, to conceive of it in terms of things rather than processes. When we think of it in this way, we understand it as consisting of all those things which are not the product of abstract human design: forests, swamps, mountains, oceans, etc. We then contrast nature with the human-made environment, consisting of cities, artefacts, technologies, etc. We make the same mistake in thinking about nature at the level of the self: the natural self is equated with the body, the instincts, intuitions, emotions etc, and this is contrasted with the civilized self, consisting of the controlled rational ego. The environmentalist's defence of nature is accordingly read as a project not only to save existing swamps, forests, etc, but to restore lost ones. Introspectively it is taken to imply a counter-cultural ethos of spontaneity, intuitiveness and instinctuality. From the present point of view, this is a mistaken reading. To 'return to nature' is not to restore a set of lost things or attributes, but rather to allow a certain process to begin anew."

So what does 'returning to nature' mean in the urbanized world we live in?

Mathews suggests that it means:

"...allowing this world to go its own way. It means letting the apartment blocks and warehouses and roads grow old. Yes, we shall have to maintain them, since we shall need to continue to use and inhabit them. Inhabitation will also call for adaptation and aesthetic enhancement. But this is compatible with a fundamental attitude of letting be, of acquiescence in the given, and of working within its terms of reference, rather than insisting upon further cycles of demolition and 'redevelopment'. Gradually such a world, left to grow old, rather than erased for the sake of something entirely new, will be absorbed into the larger process of life on earth. Concrete and bricks will become weathered and worn. Moss and ivy may take over the walls. Birds and insects may colonize overhangs and cavities within buildings. Green fingers will open up cracks in pavements. Bright surfaces will fade, acquiring natural patinas. Under the influence of gravity, the hard edges of modern architecture will soften, and imitate the moulded contours of landforms. Given time, everything is touched by the processes of life, and eventually taken over by them, to be fed into the cycle of decay and rebirth."

Interesting eh?

Foucault, power, sovereignty#2

An interesting paper by Mitchell Dean, which links and connects Foucault, Schmitt and Agamben. Dean makes some good points. He says that:

"For Foucault, politics can only be approached as the articulation or displacement of the poles of a series of oppositions: the right of death and the power of life, sovereignty and bio-politics, the 'city-citizen' and 'shepherd-flock' games, individualizing and totalizing character of modern powers, techniques of government and techniques of self, reason of state and liberalism, etc. But the point at which they link, overlap, interact, of enter a zone of indistinction is difficult to discern. Foucault proposes their relations are demonic, but cannot tell us why or how. "

I've always puzzled how Foucault's toolbox could be used to make sense of the detention camps for refugees and illegal immigrants situated on the edge of the political life of liberal democracies. I've wanted use Foucault's toolbox to move beyond the discourse of natural right deployed by many left liberal critics of the detention camps who appeal to international agreements and seek the universalization of certain rights without exception.

But I haven't made much progress and I'd begin to suspect that I'd reached the limits of Foucault's account of power re the duality of sovereignty and bio-politics. Maybe governmentality----the techniques of of government and the reasons of state would do. But it didn't give that much depth as illegal immigrants are both outside and inside the normative rule of law.

Sovereignty is important here. As Schmitt points out, sovereignty is precisely the power to determine the exception to the rule. Thus it is the act of sovereignty that captures the Guantánamo detainees, such as David Hicks, and then pushes them beyond the reach and protection of the US and Australian sovereign state. The Australian state is also dismantling the rights and laws of the legal system so as to make exceptions of 'asylum seekers' in order to legally intern them in places offshore (the 'Pacific Solution') and exempt them from the laws of the land.

So there things stood with a question mark over Foucault's toolbox.

start

Dean makes a second point. He adds that there is a:

"...possibility that Foucault has underestimated the extent to which sovereign forms of power were constituted in relation to notions of life, and a failure to distinguish different concepts of life."

The detention camp, which suggests that the state of exception is invoked with respect to refugees and illegal immigrants, has pretty much become stablized within the moral and political life of the liberal polity.

philosophy on the internet

I have often advocated that philosophy can, and should, have a greater involvement in public life on the grounds that the broader presence of philosophy in public life is important both to our society and to the profession.

This line of thinking highlights the personal value and social usefulness of philosophy engaged in public life; holds that the tradition of philosophy in public life has been eclipsed and the field of philosophy suffers from it being almost entirely dominated by professional academic philosophers who are paid to philosophize.

The internet enables philosophy's engagement with public life to begin with little startup or operational cost. It opens up the potential for philosophy to be otherwise to an academic practice of philosophy.

Tennesse has some comments on the philosophy and internet radio talk last Friday here and here. His first comment, written before the show, says that he saw it as:

"...a chance to finally give philosophy a public voice, the Internet is doing amazing things....While I believe that traditionally important philosophers are ignoring the internet, I also believe they are being left behind. Those of us who inhabit the digital realm don't care about those who are left behind, but about those who are with us."

Two examples of a digital academia in Australia are Borderlands and Contretemps.

This raises the following questions: 'What sort of public voice should philosophy have in a digital age? Would it have diverse voices?What would a public philosophy look like in Australia? Is economic rationalism Australia's public philosophy? Is not neo-liberalism a public philosophy that has emerged as an effort to address the ills besetting the modern Australian polity?

We need to address these questions because public philosophy is often seen as a moral substitute or replacement for a decayed Christian religion in a secular liberal polity.

Tennesse's second comment, written after the show, says that the content of the radio show became:

"...a critique of Academy's lack of engagement with technology, and why this might have been...As traditional forms of information distrubution have moved online - budgetary reports, commissioner's reports from government, news from the major parties, the treasury, newspapers - the Academy has remained stagnant. The technical barriers are trivial, and this can be seen as nothing other than a refusal to engage."

Why so? Tennesse highlights the cultural conservative response to the world of the internet by the Australian philosophical academy:

"The loathing of the internet is, hopefully, only a generational one. Many lecturers struggle to properly manage their email, yet alone having the mental objects in place for understanding user accounts, blogs, web-pages, online identities, information distribution channels and so forth. For many of these people, research means the books in the library, and the journals to which they publish. Efforts like wikipedia, while accepted amongst tutors, are hated for their free nature and ad-hoc publishing regimes."

'Loathing' and 'hate'. Australian academic philosophers sound like a bunch of grumpy old men without the saving grace of humor. It is yet one more criticism of the conservatism of the Australian academy.

My argument is that the internet enable philosophy to step outside the walls of academia to engage with issues of public concern to citizens. These issues often have an important philosophical dimension and that a philosophical examination of these substantive legal, social, and political problems/issues can contribute to their clarification and to their resolution.

This kind of public philosophy would adopt a critical questioning mode that highlights the presuppositions of what is often called the policy framework of government(neo-liberalism),or models of health (biomedicine), or the limits to environmental reform, keeping new policy pathways open; addressing the democratic deficit.

Foucault, power, sovereignty

As I understand Foucault's historical studies, Foucault focused on the forms of power, such as those of discipline, bio-power, and governmentality, which are other to sovereignty. Te whole thrust of bio-power (or the power over life), for instance, is that it opens up a post-sovereigntist and non-juridical conception of power.

This opening up is what I find to be innovative in Foucault's writings on power, as it brings the power relationships of biomedicne and biotechnology into the foreground. It is but a small step to extend this diverse cconception of forms of power to a politics of death--say detention camps for refugees and illegal immigrants and the destruction of a whole people. Detention camps are making a big return.

In his essay 'Governmentality' (The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, pp.87-104) Foucault juxtaposes the 'self-referring circularity' of sovereignty, as found in Hobbes and Pufendorf, to the productive arts of government from the 'reason of state' thinkers and the German cameralists who succeed in giving content to the achievement of public order and security. Foucault shifts away from the blood and sword sovereignity to statecraft, on the grounds that this understanding of government contributes to modern rationalities of governance.

However, Carl Schmitt reminds us that we cannot write sovereignty out of the picture. The sovereign decides not only what the ends of government are, but how to understand such ends and the practical content when applied to life. We cannot avoid sovereignty when we are thinking about the rationalites of the state.

So we need to think bio-politics, governance and sovereignity.

Agamben: bare life and biopolitical life

I'm reading Agamben's fragmentary, dense, multi-layered Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. It is divided into two parts: the first deals with the sovereign, the one who decides over life and death of its subjects; and the second deals with the engimatic figure of homo sacer, the "sacred man", one who can be killed and not sacrificed; but who can be killed with impunity.

According to Agamben, the connection between politics and life is fundamental to the Western tradition and there is a close and originary bond between sovereignty and this politics of life. Agamben argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, which is distinguished from bios, or politically or morally qualified life, the particular form of life of a community. The constitution of the political is made possible by an exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously makes bare life a condition of politics.

In contrast to arguments that understand political community as essentially a common 'belonging' in a shared national, ethnic, religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that 'the original political relation is the ban' in which a mode of life is actively and continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a historically specific form of political authority that arises with modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin, but rather the essence of the political.

The sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life from merely existent life, political and human life from the life of the non-human. Consequently, there is a difference for Agamben between biopolitical life and bare life:----the former being the managed political subject of power relations, and the latter being the necessary negative referent by which power-relations (through the sovereign exception) demarcates what counts as legal life, life that matters. So there there is a limit, or an 'outside' to power relations in biopolitical life.

That is Agamben's argument.

philosophy and public affairs

Consider this event organized by Jo Faulkner Friday 6th May, 2 pm on Sub Fm.

La Trobe Philosophy Postgraduates' Colloquium and Sub FM present a radio programme entitled 'Philosophy and the Internet.' The discussants include: John Lenarcic (RMIT), Ali Rizvi (La Trobe, philosophy blogger), Tennessee Leeuwenburg (philosophy blogger), Gary Sauer-Thompson (philosophy blogger). Will it go beyond teaching philosophy courses on the internet, the dream of a univeral library of philosophy online and philosophy blogs?

The event arises out of these two previous programmes on public philosophy. The first programme is about the three forms of public philosophy: cafe philosophy, facilitating Socratic discussion based around small dinner groups, and a conventional philosophy club talk and discussion. These are a "public refuge" for philosophical inquiry in that they provide an opportunity for people vexed by life's conundrums to question, doubt and express their views about a assortment of topics in a serious philosophical manner.

Now consider the quote below taken from an article on philosophy and public affairs by John Haldane:

"The most significant moment of development can be dated; it occurred in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. For the first time in the English-speaking world since Mill, a first-class philosopher had made moral and political issues a main focus of his work. The effect in America, Britain and beyond was and remains considerable. Philosophy began to be deployed in guiding the conduct of life. It soon became common to speak of "applied philosophy", though some would dearly wish to see that fact undone. The expression suggests a two stage process: first the philosophy is worked out; second it is applied. Besides demeaning the efforts of those who try to engage practical questions this conception overlooks the possibility that philosophy might arise from, and stay with practical issues, finding it methodologically more appropriate to use concepts peculiar to the issues in question rather than to replace them with highly general abstract ideas such as those of the right to liberty, or of the principle of non-maleficence."

The first part is a description of the analytic pathway whereby philosophy becomes engaged with the concerns with public affairs: the systematic theory is worked out first then it is applied to particular issues. Hence we have applied philosophy, whereby we apply established concepts of ethics to biomedical problems.

The other pathway is one where philosophy is already critically engaged in, and with, the understandings of our practices in everyday life. This pathway would puts the field of academic ethics in question and shift away from philosophy being done by professional academic philosophers who are paid to philosophize as part of their academic job. This form of public philosophy engages with the public issues of concern to citizens, and it uses our everyday categories to diagnose the ills and discontents besetting the modern Australian polity and offer prescriptions. Anxiety and public philosophy are interlinked for when the national mood grows tense and anxious we expect public philosophy to arise.

questioning modernity

In Australia it is difficult to rethink political divisions in terms of acceptance or rejection of modernity. There is some reluctance to regard modernity as simply another historically specific approach to reality, rather than as the necessary outcome of social/economic development. The modernist narrative is still seen to be alive and well as Western economies are deemed to be on an indefinite expansion as a result of the unprecedented growth in productivity precipitated by new technologies and guided by a technocratic administration.

Paul Piccone states this difficulty well:

"The problem is that the very posing the question in terms of "modernity" leads to an evaporation of discourse to a level of abstraction so general and inaccessible that the whole undertaking eventually ends up relegitimating the modernity under scrutiny by automatically translating familiar conceptual paradigms into common sense. Thus, today, the mere questioning of modernity is perceived to be either a reactionary vindication of pre-modernity or an expression of postmodern nihilism. Trapped in a unilinear temporal sequence, the modernist imagination confuses ideology with chronology, and interprets all transgressions of its dogmatically accepted norms as maladjustments or pathologies."

The recharged modernist discourse is one a Western triumphalism in which modernization and Westernization are conflated, the spread of market institutions and the globalization of Western civil society are confounded, and the 'final triumph' of 'democratic capitalism' is announced.