Monday, February 12, 2007
leaf lounge(s)
I AM en route to Auckland... now in LAX Maple Leaf lounge next to Koru (another leaf lounge), none-the-less symbolic... awaiting Air New Zealand flight 021 to Nadi and Auckland. My flight from Halifax to Toronto was upgraded which provided plenty of leg room and a tasty dish of tabouli (which turned out to be Kasha in disguise) hummus and turkish bread. My, how Air Canada is responding to multi-culturalist edicts these days! The AC flight from Toronto to LAX sat me next to a couple from India who had brought their own rice and vegetable dish with them. They were reading hindi newspapers and as they slept soundly for most of the trip I suspected they had departed from London. I'm curious about whether I will see them again on the flight to Auckland.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
According to Lazzarato, "The mechanisms of the state should not compensate the injustices caused by the system; it is not supposed to reduce the inequalities, but on the contrary, it is supposed to keep everyone in a position of differential inequality with all others. Those who govern a market which is based on competition and enterprise have to ensure that everyone remains in a state of "equal inequality", as Foucault formulated. The conditions of competition in the cultural market of the intermittents are created by an active governmentality that is to be analysed here."
When you say multicultural edicts, how do you relate those to neoliberal governance? In the past few weeks here in Montreal, the Taylor-Bouchard commission has been conducting town hall meetings to discuss the problem - 'inter alia' - of "pure laine" ressentiment in Quebec society. A series of talks at McGill University, that bastion of "equal inequality," has recently attempted to intervene in the media representation by holding a on-day series of academic panels with various well-meaning "liberal" analysts and people from the media invited to participate. A few cultural studies and critical theory people were present, including keynote speaker Kevin Robins. (Robins has been talking about the consumption of diasporic television among Turkish communities.) This very formal undertaking turned into a therapeutics and spiritual healing session punctured by the click and flash of the photographer. As another to myself I asked Monika Kin Gagnon about the problem of representation as a denial mechanism. Her talk seemed to suggest that understanding "constructionism" is a key solution to problems of difference. I felt that this risks further naturalizing social processes and that THIS session could benefit from a certain amount of reflexive self-scrutiny. There was no real room for dialogue and the response I received was perfunctory. After meeting briefly with her at the close of the session, she wryly waved me goodbye with a Heil Hitler salute.
I skipped the afternoon session and went to the philosophy department to hear a speaker from the University of Maine give a talk on Foucault's 1970s lectures on neoliberal governmentality and the constitution of Homo Economicus through rules of self-regulation and self-monitoring. This exercise of responding to this blog would constitute such a practice of self-interested self-monitoring. Someone from the audience asked the speaker to determine why Foucault turned to the idea of techniques of the self in his late works. Obviously he did this because agency and agencement are the most problematic area of his work. I suggested that he did so also because he wanted to counter all of the last remaining traces of humanist Marxism in French intellectual life. The last great theory of subjectivity in France might have been existentialism (with a few concessions to phenomenology). Certainly exitentialism and the critique of structuralist dialectics did contain some important ideas for radicals in the 60s that allowed people to think outside and beyond the governing ideologies of the day. This is just to say that I have had similar experiences on airplanes where I felt more other than self. My response to those situations was indeed along existentialist lines and the lines of fragilization to the psyche have been apparent. The key I think to matters of social justice, and here I'm especially concerned with a non-economic logic that would interfere with exisiting forms of neoliberal governance, is to take responsibility for oneself as one other among others, including oneself. How to embrace the future without thinking that the past is deterinant - especially when the person deciding your fate has taken advantage of the "formal game" between inequalities? Lazzarato has one suggestion. In France, the "seasonal workers" who populate the artistic and entertainment industries are referred to by employment laws as "intermittents du spectacle." The purpose of new changes to these laws is to regulate in more exact ways who is intermittent and who is not. By the same means, the new neoliberal laws are working to regulate the permanence of the spectacle. Might a plane ride on the way to a gallery showing not be such a moment of intermittence, where insecurity coexists with some of the most intense zones of everyday security? And might one's sanipack lunch not also be an index of risk assessment in the multicultural marketplace of subjectivities?
Post a Comment