australia

A photo booklet: australia-web.pdf Notes: A while back I made a small booklet of photos containing language, all taken on a trip to so-called Australia a few years prior. I like to make little trash projects like this. It’s kinda low-fi DIY nothing-art, but some of it is meaning-half-ful to me. Re: the file: ideally viewing would be booklet-wise: first page on its own (like a first page in a book, technically on the right), then the following ones as side-by-side pairs. (My PDF viewer has this view option, maybe yours does too.) At the time I also made some explanatory notes when sharing it with non-Australians, which I reproduce here: Straya is a weird term, a deformation of the so-called name of the so-called country (“cuntry” in Australian). So Australia > ’Straya, which leftists or liberals have used to mock white nationalists and other self-appointed patriots for their lack of refinement or education. So maybe it’s a retort from the supposed “champagne socialists” for being slandered by so many anti-elite populists. It’s a classist term too, hostile to people who are racist but supposedly can’t even say the name of their own beloved country properly, slander aimed at people who don’t have 17 years of schooling and who don’t follow the protocols of well-to-do society, people with the “wrong” views. In this it is similar to “Murika”, or however people write it, for the US. But then in the opening image of the booklet it has been recuperated by a patriotic home renovator, a profession doubtlessly associated with the term. Renovations and the valorization of land are a primary way that formerly working class (mostly white) people have gotten relatively rich (since I guess the “accord” between business and unions in the 1980s, but on hyperdrive since the mid-1990s), they have become aligned with, and even partially incorporated into, the property-owning class while still maintaining the quirks of a working class identity (they do manual labour, but are often richer than various non-manual labouring people, own their own home, numerous powerful or customized cars, etc.). It’s crazy how much of the traffic on Melbourne’s roads is people either valorizing or building homes, which are very expensive there. Such people, or their families, are clearly not kept away from education for financial reasons then. Such valorization is also parastitic on existing forms of wealth, which contradicts the rules of “good” i.e. supposedly “productive” capitalism, and this has to do with colonialism. Renovations play a major role in how unceded land is physically occupied and exploited in Oz, a kind of symptomatic obsession with concreting over and “improving” what was forcibly taken from others, who supposedly (but not actually) were not savvy enough to “improve” the land of which they were the custodians. At the same time as justifying dispossession (it is ours because we “improve” it, you didn’t (even though you obviously did, which is why we want to steal it so much)), such “improvement” also refuses to actually acknowledge that land was ever taken. So ultimately the worlds of those the land was taken from is concreted over, and that is what needs to be done, but at the same time it cannot be acknowledged that that is what is happening. What is happening is simply the matter-of-course “making better” of the world, and how could anyone doubt that this could be a good thing? It is not a case of the obscuring or replacing of a supposedly bad thing with a good thing, there is a complete absence of negativity here: a good thing is simply made better though “honest” effort, a transformation that is simply in that good thing’s nature: valorization naturalized, and whiteness naturalized. This makes me think that there’s room for a friendly-ish critique of Foucault along these lines: “improvement” is not a sui generis project as he seems to suggest it was for the forces of governmentality in Europe, but a symptom of the obsessional neurosis of the colonizer. And from the colonial context we can infer that back in Europe things would have taken place according to a similar logic, with nascent centres of state power colonizing their own hinterlands (and peoples) and what would later become the national territory. Plastering over a genocide while telling yourself over and over that it never happened, yet also not being able to stop the endless plastering for some unknown reason, and secretly or not also brimming with enjoyment at the genocide — this is familiar as part of the psychic dynamic of settlers in other colonialist hellscapes like Israel–Palestine, we have seen their ads for beachfront property developments where Gaza’s ruins now lie. We have been subject to their enjoyment of what they deny doing. The valorization will justify any degree of unspeakable, inhuman destruction. But at the same time this destruction never happened, because we colonizers are the self-evidently civilized ones. So anyway, I was pretty stunned to see this recuperation of the Straya when last there. And as if confirming these kinds of logics, a company that leases out fencing for roadworks or other public construction works is called “FORTRESS”, the IT van is from a company called “citadel technology”, shops are proud to sell supersized “MAN-BURGERS”, the language of financial investments blends with that of the well-being industries (“Power Wellness Group”), there is a “WARNING” sign but it is intransitive, a warning for all that is around it, everything, you can do a course in “Dinghies” (small inflatable watercraft), trams tell you you are being monitored, cars call you a jerk, and so on. When in Oz, I experienced many of these texts/images as absurdist accidental nonsense poetry, displayed in broad daylight, often by reading them against themselves or simply as in their most generalised/generic sense. For example, “PARK AT YOUR OWN RISK” — not just in this particular spot in front of the sign, which is what is meant, but absolutely anywhere in the universe: every time you park (your car, your arse) somewhere, you are at risk! To my mind, and this relates to valorization discussed above, “NO PAY NO PLAY” works similarly: it doesn’t mention the golf course it is on, or golf or even sport at all, and there’s no fence, it’s just a sign someone has seen fit to errect under a nice tree that is yelling in red at everyone who walks past: if you don’t pay (in the settler’s state-building currency, if you don’t valorize what whiteness has dispossessed others of), you may never play anything anywhere, the land is not for your enjoyment, meanwhile whitey has monopolized all the coin. That may sound extreme, but this logic is repeatedly and violently expressed by the country’s politicians in public. So the signs mean more than they mean to mean, similar to little essay on poetic deixis I wrote recently. Thus generalized, these signs and images also seemed to me to read as secret but public indicators of how absurd reality is in Australia/Straya. I showed some of them to people while I was there, but they were immune to their absurd/sad poetry, wouldn’t laugh, didn’t find it funny, like a fish doesn’t laugh at its water. (This reminds me of what Nathalie Quintane says in “Why Doesn’t the Far Left Read Literature” about sharing ridiculous passages from De Gaulle’s memoirs with friends who didn’t find them insane). So I laughed awkwardly at the stupid photos I was showing people, laughed at myself for laughing while the others didn’t, feeling like an idiot megalomaniac come to rain on their colonial parade, and they shuffled awkwardly in their chair and then we changed the topic. The problem is that maybe many of these pictures are only funny/sad to people who are from there, maybe people from other places won’t find them funny or sad or a combination of both. (Except for “Choose YOUR HARD” which I figure must be some kind of universal, no matter how much bending over backwards the postmodernists insist we do — the singlet was probably imported to Oz anyway, an Aussie would be happily seen wearing such a singlet, but no Aussie could come up with a slogan of such universal genius, no? It must have been one of those “hard working” folks from a far-off place such as Asia, where 7/8ths of all the shit in Oz is actually produced, I guess.) But so then they are not funny to people who live there, but also are not funny to people who are not from there. That only leaves the minor fraction of people who don’t live there but are from there, i.e. folks like me. https://anthonyduff.com is an interesting website. I guess he is schizophrenic or similar, and he has spent time in jail.

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