The Yes Men

The Yes Men, bless them, are out in force in NYC. Read about them, and Plague of Locusts about to be unleashed on the godless, here.

Mark Thatcher Ha Ha Ha

The news of Mark Thatcher's arrest has been causing much rubbing of hands here in South Africa. Always nice to see a comeuppance, and doubly nice that his odious mother is reportedly 'upset'. Among the many articles on it at the Guardian, John O'Farrell's is worth a look.

Two bits of supplementary information from the papers here in South Africa: apparently, when the police found him, he was surrounded by his wife, children and fourteen domestic workers. This may seem an unreasonably high number, until we remember that Sir Mark is famously unable to wipe his own arse. Must get messy Chez Thatch.

Also, it appears that while he was in a detention facility, Mark had his cellphone and wallet stolen, and was about to part with his jacket before the police intervened. We can only hope that Pinochet, who was recently stripped of immunity from prosecution, suffers a downfall no less ignominious.

I$NY

Friend of a friend is an agronomist for New York's Central Park. He got a call a couple of weeks ago from the Bloomberg administration. Story is that the conversation ran something like
"Hello!" (or "Hi!" or "Howdy" or "Fuck you" or whatever passes for comradely greeting in New York.)
"Hi!"
"Quick question from the Mayor."
"Fire away."
"Michael Bloomberg was wondering."
"Yes?"
"Well he wanted to know."
"Yes?"
"We want to know whether there's any chance that 100,000 people standing on the lawn in Central Park could damage the topsoil?"
"No."
"But it's 100,000 people."
"No chance at all."
"But they'd all be there at the same time. And topsoil. Well, that's delicate stuff, right? I mean, there's but a couple of inches of it in the Amazon."
"The grass is pretty tough."
"So no way then?"
"No."
"Not even if they were all fat? And ugly?"

You get the idea. Didn't stop Bloomberg banning the protest in Central Park, but at least they couldn't blame it on the mud.

Still, Bloomberg has taken a bit of a PR battering. And so, to head off the impression that Mayor's office is full of shit, they've launched a “peaceful political activist” campaign. Protesters wearing a badge claiming they're peaceful can receive discounts on protest essentials such as food, water, and eyedrops with which to rinse out pepper spray.

Not to be outdone, Code Pink have launched a far more useful campaign.
The plan is to distribute these badges to NY's finest. If they're well behaved, they get coupons.

Keep your eye on CounterConvention.org to see how this sort of incentivised policing works.

In the future, we'll be stuck in traffic

While in San Francisco last week, I overheard a discussion in which Slashdot was mentioned as one of the first venues that successfully built a vivacious and robust online community. I thought I'd wander over and get a whiff of the local cyberlife and, after a good fifteen minutes of moderate scrutiny, I’m convinced that it’s true – the Slashdot community does look remarkably lively. I’m not sure that I regret not being part of it, though. I imagine I’d lose my shit a great deal.

For instance.

What should I find but this wee thread. "SF Author Robert J. Sawyer Looks at 2014". Yes indeed, it’s a moist bout of technological pornography of the kind that gives SciFi (sic) enthusiasts a bad name. Seems as if Comrade Sawyer has been playing futurologist, casting his mind a whole ten years into the future to consider what our lives will be like in the glittering wonderworld that will be 2014. With the IT industry doing everything it can to ensure that the rule of Moore's law - computing power, though more properly the number of transistors per integrated circuit, doubling every 18 months - remains unbroken, what on earth will the world be like with computers over 100 times as powerful as today? Our day begins...

Our mornings will still begin with waking up. But forget the old-fashioned alarm-clock buzzer. Tomorrow’s bedside clock will be a sophisticated brainwave monitor. It’ll keep track of your sleep cycle, gently bringing up the room lights at precisely the right time so that you’ll feel rested, not cardiac arrested, as you awake.

Sawyer then tells of robokitchens and self-driving cars and haddock-powered Frinkifiers.

Why am I glad that I’m on the outside of this rubbish? Because the folk at Slashdot lay into our lad on the grounds that he seems to think that Moore's law about computing power is a license to posit similar advances in government regulation, robotics and income. Sure, that’s all true, but it woefully misses the point.

For most people, the kinds of technology that fascinates we geeks has made very little difference over the past few decades. I'm not talking here of the majority of the world that has yet to make a phone call. I'm talking about you and me. And for you and me, unless you’re maddeningly rich, things now are pretty much as they were a few years ago.

One of the finer illustrations of this was in a 1983 BBC pop-science programme - Q.E.D. - in which the splendid Professor Heinz Wolff traveled back in time to see how nearly forty years of technology had made a difference to the "Man on The Clapham Omnibus". His conclusion is this: if you think that air travel, telecommunications, traffic, and a bevy of domestic consumer durables are the gifts of the modern age, well, we had those in 1948.

There's a threshold argument with which Sawyer might respond - sure, 1994 looks pretty much like 2004, except for the internet. The internet changes everything. I've some sympathy for this, except that the internet is a footnote in everything else that he forecasts. The rest is just an orgy of unimaginative blah-tech. No siree. The only thing we know for sure is that, in the future, we’ll be stuck in traffic.

To be honest, the only SciFi futurologist who’s worth a damn is Arthur C. Clarke – the satellite, the virtually free international phone call and, please lord, one day the space elevator. These are fine bits of punditry.

But futurology has its limits, and it’s important to remember that the people who won’t get to ride the space elevator are likely to be just as large a percentage of the population as the people who don’t get to make the cheap international phone call today. And I think we can leave the pasty denizens of Silicon Valley to enjoy their REM-synched alarm clocks without too much envy.

Public Sociologies

You may have noticed that blogging was suspended over the past couple of weeks. You may not have noticed that this was because I was at the American Sociological Association annual meetings. Now that I'm back in Durban, here's a wee reflection on the whole gig...

The American Sociological Association's 2004 meeting theme was a nifty bit of footwork. The conference title: "Public Sociologies". In framing the convention with this rather queer term - isn't sociology about the public already? - Michael Burawoy, president of the ASA, was making an important intervention in a range of battles in the US.

Within the American academy, the discipline of sociology has always been taking a public battering from disciplines that have more happily grasped the nettle of positivism - economics and political science in particular. [1]

This is symptomatic of broader trends of disdain within the US academy, where post-WWII sociology has been successfully associated, through McCarthy, with marxism, and thereby with communism, and thereby with unfettered evil and, to boot, with both a remoteness from the US people and an unscientific methodology. Perhaps this goes a little way to explaining why the US lacks a high profile, much less a visibly *public* sociologist, in the way that there are elsewhere in the North. France has Touraine, Germany has the entire population of Frankfurt, and, hell, even the UK has Tony Giddens. This isn't to say that there aren't public intellectuals in the US. Of course there are - but if one looks at the headline speakers at the ASA, they were Mary Robinson (lawyer), Arundhati Roy, Hernando Cardoso (sociologist), and Paul Krugman (economist). Spot the US sociologist? Exactly. But this is part of the point of the conference. In its war of position with economics and political science, U.S. sociology can claim to be a much broader church than either of its more monastic academic brethren. And at the Public Sociologies meeting, the panelists were very popular populist commentators on the sorts of trends that have captivated the imaginations of a key constituencies in the US- globalisation, inequality, human rights. The treatment of these ideas at the professional level in other disciplines, while occasional and less occasionally interesting, has rarely been populist. By pitching itself as the professional interpreter of phenomena such as Seattle protests, the effects of corporate America (esp in media), and race relations, the ASA steals thunder from the American Political Science Association [2] and the American Economic Association. And that's not such a bad thing.

But there wasn't only a positional play here. If that were all that might be said, it'd be a sad replay of history. After all, the first pro-French Revolution anti-Market public sociologist wasn't Marx. It was August Comte. And the positivism that he nurtured had a very specific role for sociologists as elite high priests whose duty it was to inculcate capitalists with the appropriately altruistic virtues that were lacking in capitalism. It would be unfortunate if the sole purpose of the ASA in 2004 were to restate the role of sociologist as "professional interpreter of public discontent to the elites".

Luckily, this conference was also about dealing, at some level, with the contradictions involved in calling for sociologists to be middle class populists. I'm thinking here of Michael Burawoy's call for the provincialisng of US sociology. That one could hardly imagine US sociology more parochial (while there are Latin American and Asian ASA sections, there's nothing on Africa - that's for the anthropologists) is, I think, part of the point. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty's call to "Provincialise Europe", ie. to historicise, de-universalise and de-parochialise the class-positioned 'occidental' imagination, Burawoy's call to provincialise US sociology was a political and methodological intervention.

To be able to demand the provincialising of sociology, one has already to have taken a specific relation to the categories of "universal" and "irrelevant" which many US sociologists hold dear, and to ask questions of audience and power. The 'laws of society' sociology, the kind that Durkheim was after, the kind that still speaks to a large and growing fraction within US sociology, the fraction that finds itself increasingly at the service of the state through mushrooming subdisciplines like criminology, is the one that comes in for a bit of a spanking here.

There were a good number of panels that addressed the role of the critical sociologist in society, including an excellent discussion on Sociology and Public Policy in Democratizing South Africa which featured Eddie Webster, Shireen Hassim, Blade Nzimandze and e-Debater Jacklyn Cock. Mind, none of the sessions I went to resolved the contradiction of how privileged mainly white US professors cross class and race lines. The discussion of gender was also uneven, and often compartmentalised, and there's little excuse for that.

Of course, one might find the whole idea of doing public sociology at an elite institution contradictory. One might want, for example, less of a passive revolutionary approach, and would want sociologists to 'get out there and walk the talk'. That's fair enough, and it's the constant challenge of praxis to be able to pursue the congressional sentiments in the constituency. But given that we're talking about a conference, and not a discipline, and not a proper Social Forum, the ASA conference signals a very welcome shift in the right direction.

---
Asides:
[1] When I was a student in a US university taking courses in political science, my declaration that I was a 'rural sociologist' was met with a "huh, so he counts cows". And that was from the politics professor.

[2] My favourite quote about APSA is from Alasdair MacIntyre, and it's up online at the splendid Virtual Stoa, at which the splendid Chris Brooke blogs, and from which I've copied.

"There once was a man who aspired to be the author of the general theory of holes. When asked "What kind of hole - holes dug by children in the sand for amusement, holes dug by gardeners to plant lettuce seedlings, tank traps, holes made by roadmakers?" he would reply indignantly that he wished for a general theory that would explain all of these. He rejected ab initio the - as he saw it - pathetically common-sense view that of the digging of different kinds of holes there are quite different kinds of explanations to be given; why then he would ask do we have the concept of a hole? Lacking the explanations to which he originally aspired, he then fell to discovering statistically significant correlations; he found for example that there is a correlation between the aggregate hole-digging achievement of a society as measured, or at least one day to be measured, by econometric techniques, and its degree of technological development. The United States surpasses both Paraguay and Upper Volta in hole-digging; there are more holes in Vietnam than there were. These observations, he would always insist, were neutral and value-free. This man's achievement has passed totally unnoticed except by me. Had he however turned his talents to political science, had he concerned himself not with holes, but with modernization, urbanization or violence, I find it difficult to believe that he might not have achieved high office in the APSA."

From his essay, "Is a science of comparative politics possible?" from his collection, Against the Self-Images of the Age, Duckworth, 1971, p.260.

I left my heart in the California Supreme Court

Seems like the season of love is over, at least for the time being in San Francisco. All the same-sex marriages performed at City Hall earlier this year have just been voided. More on this vast disappointment here.

WTO Unsurprise

It has been nearly a fortnight, but I've been waiting for a chance to share Devinder Sharma's thoughts before passing comment on the recent fiasco at the WTO. Now that he has been uploaded at Znet, you can read Devinder in all his glory. (And do contribute to Znet if you can - they're an important home for alternative media.)

Back to the WTO. At the end of July, in response to a 'drop dead deadline' (a technical term), the EU and US managed to punt developing countries' objections to EU and US agricultural proposals across the negotiating line. The proposals are appalling. Over to Devinder:

"The framework actually provides a cushion to the US and EU to raise farm subsidies from the existing level. ... If we were to add all the components as specified in the WTO framework, the EU subsidies at present will total around (including the under-notified coupled support) Euro 55.8 billion, which is far less than what it is supposed to reduce. In other words, EU gets enough leverage to increase its subsidies. No wonder the so-called phase out of agriculture subsidies has not snowballed into a political crisis in any of the European countries. ... The United States on the other hand is wanting to shift the US $ 180 billion for ten years that it has provided to farmers under the notorious Farm Bill 2002 (70 per cent of this amount is to be spent in the first three years, before George Bush goes to elections) to the Blue Box. Since the WTO will now specify the historical period from which the Blue Box implementation will begin, it means that the US can now protect the yearly installment of its counter-cyclic payments to farmers.

Yes indeed. Through the combined use of colour-coded boxes, a pocket calculator, and the threat of economic violence, the EU and US have pushed developing countries towards policies that will almost certainly harm the poorest farmers and farm labourers, while obliging their own farming bloc to undergo very little trauma.

If you're wondering why developing countries put up with this shit, Devinder points out what happens when they act up:

International NGOs have said that the EU had withdrawn aid to Kenya, the most vocal of the African countries. It may be recalled that Kenya was the country that had staged a walkout at Cancun thereby leading to the collapse of the WTO Ministerial. This time EU withdrew US $ 60.2 million aid to Kenya on July 21 under the pretext of 'bad governance'. UK Trade Minister Patricia Hewitt has already gone on record stating that Britain was using its influence to persuade developing countries. Moreover if 'bad governance' is the EU 's legitimate concern there seems to be no justification in joining hands with the United States at such international negotiations after the US illegal war in Iraq. The terror of trade however does not operate on ethics and morality.

In the July negotiations, many African countries were unhappy with the content of the offers on the WTO table. They were silenced not only by the EU and US, but by voices from within Africa. Patrick Bond (the man who's going to be the new jefe at the Centre for Civil Society) calls this regional adoption of hegemony "sub-imperialism". I'm not sure why the new term is warranted, frankly, since this kind of capitulation by elite blocs has been a fairly standard feature in the colonial enterprise. But, whatever the term, the outcome isn't likely to be pleasant. Watch this space for more WTO updates, and in the meantime, go check out Devinder's thoughts here.

Rewriting the politics of pain

The human sciences, activism, and politics share a common problem. How does the writer represent voices that are not their own? Every representation is an act of power, of deploying someone else’s voice in the service of the writer’s truth. Joan Didion puts it well, and while I don’t have the source here to put it in her more exactly elegant words, I think it runs something like: “If you’re a writer, you’re selling someone out. Always.”

Anthropological versions of sociology have devised an awkward compromise. It’s call participatory action research, and in principle, it’s a fine idea. Researchers work with communities to work on research that the community wants. Mechanisms are put in place to hold researchers accountable, the community retains control of the research, and ‘experts are on tap, not on top’.

Predictably, it’s never that simple. Participatory action research can all too often turn into a fig-leaf for well intentioned researchers to get increased buy-in to projects that postpone and shrink the project of accountability into merely a final accounting. The political economy of action research will have its pound of flesh.

Which is why it’s so refreshing to read a book from an entirely different tradition that gets the politics of accountability, and so much else, so right. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that it’s a South African book. South Africa has been grappling with accountability, and truth, very publicly in the years since the end of apartheid. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its many flaws, was a brave experiment in truth-telling. While it’s far from clear that the Commission’s goals of closure and completeness let alone reconciliation were ever achieved, it did create an unprecedented space for new voices to be heard. Not the voices of the torturers, bigots and racists who now walk freely in the new rainbow nation, but the voices of their survivors.

Eleven survivors of the new South Africa have found powerful voice in a wonderful book called Finding Mr Madini, a book ‘directed’ by Jonathan Morgan, a psychologist working in the tradition of narrative therapy. In its clinical form, narrative therapy aims to turn the neuroses of its writers into written and hence more tractable form. It does more than that, though. It opens the possibility of transmuting pain into politics. And that’s what the book does.

It’s a book that started as a book that Morgan wanted to write about homelessness in Johannesburg. Through a series of events, the book becomes a book written by Morgan and a group of homeless writers for whom he runs a workshop in which the writers bring their own ‘windows’ – not-necessarily-coherent glimpses into their lives, their truths. And then one of the writers goes missing, and the book becomes a book written by Morgan, and ten other Great African Spider Project writers, in which they write a book, and look for their missing comrade.

Morgan avoids the temptation to write the setting for the jewels of storytelling brought to his class by the GASPers. They write the narrative thread almost, but not quite, as equals. (Which is fair enough – it’s not a Wiki, it’s a book.) I’m not going to spill the beans about the stories – they’re in turn magic realist, high camp, Hemmingway, and Carver. It’s a must read, not just for the stories, but for what it teaches about how hard, and how possible, it is for collective writing to rock the world.

That said, finding Finding Mr Madini isn’t easy. If you’re outside South Africa, actually even if you’re in South Africa, it’s not easy to get your hands on a copy of this wonderous book. But if you do, let me know, and I’ll tell you what happened to Sipho Madini.

And so it ends

After a 2% showing at the polls, the 'New' National Party, the people who brought you apartheid and inspired the classic I've never met a nice South African (a work of art far better than any inspired by the National Party's own cosmetologists) have decided to call it a day. They're merging with, er, the ANC.

Seems as if they've found enough within the ANC's economic and social programmes to consign themselves to the dustbin of history. It can't help that the ANC have been hammering at the NNP with precisely the same state appuratus that the NNP once used on them. And the ANC's economic apartheid surely has some resonance in the NNP's core constituencies.

The splendid Peter-Dirk Uys, in a mimicked conversation between Thabo Mbeki and P.W. Botha has the latter, referring to the former's denialist policies on HIV/AIDS, saying "You killed more black men than I did, and you didn't fire a shot". Harsh, but fair.

Sexed up

Being unable to get online for more than a few minutes a day, I'm not sure whether this has yet done the rounds. But George Bush has been the victim of the kind of research that got the British government in such trouble last year. Here's what GW said about Fidel Castro:

“The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here’s how he bragged about the
industry,” said Bush. “This is his quote — ‘Cuba has the cleanest and most
educated prostitutes in the world’ and ‘sex tourism is a vital source of hard
currency.’”

This wisdom is culled from a 1992 Dartmouth undergraduate essay, in which the original quote runs:

Speaking in 1992 to the Cuban parliament, Castro actually said, “There are prostitutes, but prostitution is not allowed in our country. There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist.”

More here.

Ask not what you did for your country

Every memorial involves revision. Here in South Africa, the celebration of ten years of democracy has been the occasion for an orgy of historical reconstruction. The state-run SABC has been running documentaries on the history of political parties, for instance. It's a telling of history from the corridors of power that hears the protests and resistance in fields and townships only as a distant murmur. Through the echo chamber of decontextualised parliamentary politics, the legitimacy of the SA government itself is being peddled in these cosy misrememberings. As a friend said yesterday, "think about any of the number of things that people did to free Mandela. Everyone did something, a strike, a march, a walkout, something. Now they're being told that Mandela freed them. This isn't history. It's theft.