Tag: precarious life

I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something while the rest of the family sleeps, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of whom were gassed, with U.S. compliance, by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran, and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia; I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pajamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian. I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante; I see a mother in Ghana, her name is Aya, which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep; I see the ruins of Kabul and a man going home; and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and, in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost. 

I am convinced of this in the night, although I don’t know why. The next step is to reject all the tyranny’s discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences, and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked; each has become a gang’s code word, stolen from humanity. 

Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision-making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. 

Democracy should not be confused with the “freedoms” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls, or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense. 

Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, are being made unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. For instance, how many U.S. citizens, if consulted, would have said Yes to George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol over the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect, which is already provoking disastrous floods in many places and threatens, within the next twenty-five years, far worse disasters?

 It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorák composed his Symphony from the New World. He wrote it while directing the National Conservatory of Music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, eighteen months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony, the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of thse without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the U.S. Constitution addressed in 1787. I know of no other work of art that expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorák was the son of a peasant, and his father once dreamed of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs that inspired generation after generation of migrants who became U.S. citizens. For Dvorák the force of those beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from the governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Dvorák was asked what he thought about the future of American music, and he recommended that U.S. composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony from the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centered on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.

 Today the power of the same country that inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognizing only the reality of their own firepower, hypocritical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them), and ruthless B-52 plotters. How did this happen? The question is rhetorical, for there is no single answer, and it is idle, for no answer will dent their power yet. But to ask it in this way in the night reveals the enormity of what has happened.

—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s

full text here

“Everyone knows that pain is endemic to life, and wants to forget this or relativize it. All the variants of the myth of a Fall from the Golden Age, before pain existed, are an attempt to relativize the pain suffered on earth. So too is the invention of Hell, the adjacent kingdom of pain-as-punishment. Likewise the discovery of Sacrifice. And later, much later, the principle of Forgiveness. One could argue that philosophy began with the question: why pain? 

Yet, when all this has been said, the present pain of living in the world is perhaps in some ways unprecedented. Consumerist ideology, which has become the most powerful and invasive on the planet, sets out to persuade us that pain is an accident, something that we can insure against. This is the logical basis for the ideology’s pitilessness. 

I write in the night, although it is daytime. A day in early October 2002. For almost a week the sky above Paris has been blue. Each day the sunset is a little earlier and each day gloriously beautiful. Many fear that before long, U.S. military forces will be launching the “preventive” war against Iraq, so that the U.S. oil corporations can lay their hands on further and supposedly safer oil supplies. Others hope that this can be avoided. Between the announced decisions and the secret calculations, everything is kept unclear, since lies prepare the way for missiles. I write in a night of shame. 

By shame I do not mean individual guilt. Shame, as I’m coming to understand it, is a species feeling which, in the long run, corrodes the capacity for hope and prevents us looking far ahead. We look down at our feet, thinking only of the next small step. People everywhere, under very different conditions, are asking themselves: Where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime? 

The well-heeled experts answer: Globalization. Postmodernism. Communications Revolution. Economic Liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of Where are we? the experts murmur: Nowhere. Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical-because the most pervasive-chaos that has ever existed? It’s not easy to grasp the nature of the tyranny, for its power structure (ranging from the 200 largest multinational corporations to the Pentagon) is interlocking yet diffuse, dictatorial yet anonymous, ubiquitous yet placeless. It tyrannizes from offshore, not only in terms of Fiscal Law but in terms of any political control beyond its own. Its aim is to delocalize the entire world. Its ideological strategy, beside which Bin Laden’s is a fairy tale, is to undermine the existent so that everything collapses into its special version of the virtual, from the realm of which -and this is the tyranny’s credo-there will be a never-ending source of profit. It sounds stupid. Tyrannies are stupid. This one is destroying at every level the life of the planet on which it operates…. 

The shame begins with the contestation (which we all acknowledge somewhere but, out of powerlessness, dismiss) that much of the present suffering could be alleviated or avoided if certain realistic and relatively simple decisions were taken. There is a very direct relation today between the minutes of meetings and minutes of agony. 

Does anyone deserve to be condemned to certain death simply because they don’t have access to treatment which would cost less than $2 a day? This was a question posed by the director-general of the World Health Organization last July. She was talking about the AIDS epidemic, in Africa and elsewhere, in which an estimated 68 million people will die within the next eighteen years.

 I’m talking about the pain of living in the present world. Most analyses and prognoses about what is happening are understandably presented and studied within the framework of their separate disciplines, economics, politics, media studies, public health, ecology, national defense, criminology, education, etc. In reality, each of these separate fields is joined to another to make up the real terrain of what is being lived. It happens that in their lives people suffer from wrongs which are classified in separate categories, and suffer them simultaneously and inseparably. 

A current example: some Kurds who fled recently to Cherbourg, and have been refused asylum and risk being repatriated to Turkey, are poor, politically undesirable, landless, exhausted, illegal, and the clients of nobody. And they suffer each of these conditions at one and the same second! To take in what is happening, an interdisciplinary vision is necessary in order to connect the “fields” which are institutionally kept separate. And any such vision is bound to be (in the original sense of the word) political. The precondition for thinking politically on a global scale is to see the unity of the unnecessary suffering taking place. This is the starting point.“ 

—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s

full text here

From The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society by Susan Griffin

“Waking, my hand meets the cotton sheets on my bed, my mouth meets the water I drink as I arise, my eyes meet the morning light, shadows of clouds, the pine tree newly planted in our backyard, my ears meet the sounds of a car two blocks east. Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving a tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything. 

Isn’t this what shapes our days? The paradox accounts for gravity, which is a kind of eros. The great mass of the earth curving space and time around it, the greater mass of the sun drawing the earth in an even circular motion, balanced between fusion and a solitary direction. 

There is an eros present at every meeting, and this is also sacred. One only has to listen inwardly to the histories and resonances of the word we use for religious experience. In Sanskrit the word satsang which translates into English as “meeting” means “godly gathering.” In the English language the word “common” is linked through the word “communicate” to “communion.” And earlier meanings of “common” point to levels of meaning that have been obscured in our idea of the sacred. Gary Snyder gives us the etymology for “common” as “ko, ‘together,’ with (Greek) moin, ‘held in common.’” And he also traces the word back to the Indo-European root mei, meaning “‘to move, to go, to change.’” This “… had an archaic special meaning of ‘exchange of goods and services within a society as regulated by custom or law,’” he writes, as in “the principle of gift economies: ‘the gift must always move.’…” And the gift does move.

 To exist in a state of communion is to be aware of the nature of existence. This is where ecology and social justice come together, with the knowledge that life is held in common. Whether we know it not, we exist because we exchange, because we move the gift. And the knowledge of this is as crucial to the condition of the soul as its practice is to the body.”

MONA HATOUM, DEEP THROAT, 1996

“Mona Hatoum began her artistic career using performance and video in the 80’s, focusing with great intensity on the idea of ​​the body and performance action. From the beginning of the 1990s, her artistic work was developed through large-scale installations that aim to engage the viewer in the contradictory emotions of desire and repulsion, fear and fascination. In her sculptural installations, Mona Hatoum has used the resource of the transformation of the familiar and the everyday (household objects such as chairs, tables, kitchen utensils, etc.) into something strange, threatening and dangerous. Even the human body becomes unusual in works like Corps étranger (1994) or Deep Throat (1996), installations using endoscopic paths through the “interior landscape” of the artist’s own body. In Homebound (2000) and Sous Tension (1999) Hatoum uses a somewhat surreal and threatening domestic dramatization, to catch the viewer in their perceptual and corporal journey through the space of the installation. The evolution of the artistic work of Hatoum lies in the spatial extension of the body within its limits, borders and spaces of collision, creating installations with an emphasis on the spatial construction caused by the effect of the displacement and the movements of the body in them. A body which in turn is the personal element of her autobiography and the material with which it identifies, the subaltern and the cartographic exile of her own autobiography, her status as a female Palestinian artist.

The ability to recreate and question cultural and political geographic spaces has become an invariable in her work, from the personal condition of exile and the reference to transportation and new ways of relating spatially, objectively and culturally in the passage, transition and movement of the body, giving a broad perspective of a body located between the interstitial of the artistic performance. Exodus, displacement, and instability are inescapable concepts in the life and work of Hatoum, and according to Kimberly Lamm, “the only real consistency in Hatoum’s work is her destabilization of ‘home’” (Lamm, 2004: 2)….The installations and sculptural objects of Mona Hatoum are defined based on spatiality, the measurement and the displacement of the body, and are impregnated by a sense of dislocation and disorientation, which leans towards the grotesque. Hatoum frequently redeems the uprooting of familiar and strange places, which occurs in the displacement, in the exile and through the body and their affects. They become a dislocation of memory. The fears and defamiliarizations of transit spaces and unearthed everyday objects, irreconcilable with their basic function they are transformed into something different, something unstable and precarious as in her work Present Tense (1996). The materials used in her installations such as hair, nails, stains, blood, etc., remind us of the relation between the body and the performativity of space; since her work is associated with the fabric of space and the body. And is directly linked to her own condition of nomadism, passage and transit between three territorial political entities, Palestine, Lebanon and Great Britain. But it is not only her status as an exiled Palestinian woman, which has repercussions on her work. Her work is developed challenging the stereotypes of reality, as she says: “In a very general sense I want to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point (…) A kind of self-examination and an examination of the power structures that control us”

—Toni Mulet