Peaceful G20 protest at Queen & Spadina from Meghann Millard on Vimeo.

I saw it first at I cite.

As much as the national anthem gets perverted daily in problematic constructions of our national identity, in this video, it appears that some of the key lyrics “free,” “love,” and “standing on guard” are interpreted quite differently by either side!

The entertainment industry’s willingness to use parliament to impose censorship and arbitrary punishment in the course of chasing a few extra quid is so depraved and terrible that it has me in fear for the very underpinnings of democracy and civil society.

Indeed, the swiftness with which the DEA went through the British parliament is something that does not bode well for democratic processes. A scant debate, a paltry showing of MPs, and blatant ignoring of public outcry marks the very opposite of engaged and responsible government. Add to the this that the substance of the law is largely the construct of profit-driven (i.e. not concerned with democracy) private industry, we have here authoritarian rule by the unelected and the unaccountable. A travesty.

So what, it’s just music and movies, right? Cutlral production plays a massive part in the circulation of ideas, social norms, possibilities and potentials, etc. This move represents the continued imposition of control in the name of profit on the very texts that might hold the key to new discoveries, that might open up posibilities for better worlds. In process and in content, this law is an attempt by a powerful elite to suppress the common, to lock down communication, and to punish those who dare to dissent. It is absurd.

Therefore, for me, my antagonist is the person who passively watches CNN all day long and says that’s the world. My ideal is the person who looks at CNN and says, no, that’s not the world, that’s a version of the world and my duty as a mind in society is to understand what alternative versions there are in order for me to make my choice and to go out and to change the world.

And this equally nice one from Giroux himself:

Unfortunately, the discourse of clarity appears to rest on a universal standard of literacy that presumably need not be questioned as well as a self-righteous and deeply anti-democratic suggestion that most people are just too dumb or indifferent to struggle with language and meaning. This approach to language suppresses questions of context – who reads what under what conditions? More importantly, it presumes that language is a transparent medium for the seamless transmission of existing facts that need only be laid out in an agreed-upon fashion. Such a position runs the risk of fleeing the politics of culture by situating language outside of history, power and struggle.

This, of course, is a pretty valuable discussion to have, and one with at least a twenty year-old history. Indeed, why should patriotism only be associated with sons and not daughters? While we’re at it though, we ought to take it further and ask important questions about the music that is supposed to represent the people of this country. Let’s look at the French version, and begin the process of eliminating its gender specificity (“nos aieux” = “our forefathers”). Moreover, let’s ask ourselves whether a country whose indigenous population was largely polytheistic, and whose contemporary population is a grand mixture of people of many religious and non-religious backgrounds, needs an anthem that so prominently features the Christian deity, in both languages—they are, after all “His” sons. One step further.  Let’s acknowledge the troubled history of national anthems themselves as emerging out of a violent, colonial, oppressive nationalism, a violence that is reflected in “Car ton bras sait porter l’épée” (“As in thy arm ready to wield the sword”). And finally, we might just take this opportunity to re-examine the term “patriot” itself, and acknowledge its Latin and Greek roots: pater =  father. [1] I’d say that this is one way to harness the debate and hold the Harperites to the letter on this move. Then we can have a proper discussion about the notion of national political and cultural representation.

In a move sure to cause a vivid debate, I certainly don’t take this as a signal that the Harper government has all of sudden put gender issues on the table as part of its message. No. This is the same party and leader who have objected to same sex marriage and benefits for same-sex couples, who advocated disallowing women to appeal for pay equity, oppose national childcare, cut funding to Status of Women Canada, who wage a vicious war on the poor that disproportionately affects women, and who generally espouse conservative “family values”…the list goes on. Changing a word is unlikely to have material effects on the lives of Canadian women or anyone else.

But what is perhaps most subtly disturbing about this is that it comes at the very same time as a federal budget. As politicos are fond of calling it, this is an example of “deflective” or “deflection” politics. DeBord called it spectacle. The idea is to seed a story so perfectly well-suited for “person on the street,” populist “analysis” that members of the mainstream media simply cannot help themselves; they simply HAVE to cover it, it’s news. It’s also much easier to get a reporter out on the street with a microphone to ask people if they think nouns or pronouns [2] ought to be replaced in the national anthem than it is to ask people what they think about, say, a $3.25 a week increase in Child Tax Benefits ($3.25!?), continued promotion of “corporate welfare,” increased efforts in securitisation (which is, interestingly, also included in a chapter about “Supporting Families and Communities”)…and this list goes on. Especially after the Olympics, this is the perfect topic to deflect attention away from the budget; it is downright entertaining to see people speak passionately about “owning the podium” and how much it meant to “us” to have the national anthem played more times than any other host country had theirs played. It’s significantly less entertaining to have dry economists point out the failings (or successes) of a budget.

By nature a deflective tactic is also presumed to be less important than the issue from which it is supposed to divert attention; one wouldn’t deflect with something more crucial, that would draw unwanted attention. There is rarely any intention to move forward on the actual substance of the deflection. In this case, I think it would be fair to say that there will be a 50/50 split amongst those people polled who care about the issue, it will gain no real political traction, and it will thus have served its purpose as an entertaining piece of theatre.

But I don’t mean to suggest that the issue is not actually important, in fact, I argue the opposite. Using gender as a deflection is further evidence of this government’s contempt for progressive social issues. They have cravenly manipulated the intense feeling of pride held by many who live in this country over the great successes of hard-working, talented athletes; they have instrumentalised the supposed sanctity of the national anthem; and they have trivialised gender issues as a means to deflect attention from a budget that appears at first to be business as usual, but which I am sure, upon further inspection, will yield further damages for people, and further gains for corporate Canada. For me, this shows ultimate disrespect for each of these important issues. In addition to playing classic divisive politics (they are ignoring people affected by the many other problematic issues in the anthem’s lyrics), it seems to me a typically chauvinistic approach to suggest that issues affecting women could be addressed by paying attention to “aesthetics” rather than to material concerns.

So, what do people think about this?

Links:

http://www.budget.gc.ca/2010/plan/toc-tdm-eng.html
http://www.policyalternatives.ca/
http://www.rabble.ca/columnists/2008-stephen-harper-vs-feminism
http://www.newstalk650.com/story/20100304/30241
http://www.thespec.com/News/BreakingNews/article/732997
http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/04/the-government-delivers-an-empty-almost-flippant-budget/
http://www.stephentaylor.ca/2010/03/stakeholder-reaction-to-the-2010-budget/
http://www.pch.gc.ca/pgm/ceem-cced/symbl/anthem-eng.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Canada#Proposed_changes_to_lyrics

[2] Interestingly, this is probably one of the only times we’ll see debate over grammar occupy a front and centre position in the mainstream media!

1) This notion that “contemporary capitalism enables an ontology that is at least partially grounded in the common,” as you note raises some interesting possibilities for seeing alternatives to what, if we listen too much to Zizek, Agamben, et al., too often seems like an impossible situation. However, it also raises what I think are some crucial questions, which so far as I can tell are unanswered in the first section of the book. That is: are H&N proposing that this thinking in terms of the common is a wholly new development, contingent first on the globalisation of capital? Is the contemporary situation the only situation that could give rise to an ontology of the common? Is it possible that this is the re-emergence of “commons” thinking (and here I am thinking, as I do, of notions of gift-cultures developed by Mauss and others, in which “property” was less individual than collective – or even trans-individual.) Also, would it have been possible for a commons-based paradigm to have emerged out of alternative political-economic paradigms?

2) Related to the above: if it is the case that capital sets up the possibility for a new (or even renewed) sense of the common, then there is a possible, though I think in the end minor, issue that appears in their assessment of the “second stream” of interpretations of Foucault (pp. 57-58) (Agamben, Derrida, Nancy) in which they seem to take a shot at Holderlin’s notion that “where ther is danger/so the rescue grows as well,” which Heidegger also picked up on in his notion of the “saving power.” I realise that they are suggesting that these theorists don’t do enough to see the possible affirmative possibilities of the saving power, but it seems that H&N could have done a little more to acknowledge that their thesis begins from a similar perspective if only inasmuch as they locate the power of the common from within contemporary developments in globalisation.

3) I really like their comparison of Badiou and Foucault’s differing notions of the event. One thing that has bugged me in my reading of Badiou (and it is nascent) is the problem with how one knows whether or not what one is doing counts as an event? With Badiou you don’t know until after…and if after all your efforts you discover that it wasn’t an event, then what? This is what makes Zizek propose the refusal thesis I think, maybe because it is assured that doing nothing does something (?). Their reading of Foucault is more to my liking in that it doesn’t require hindsight – biopolitics is an event pure and simple; the trick is, as they suggest, this needs to be organised in some way. If not, it seems that simply accepting the reality of biopolitics as an event leaves the door open for complacency of the sort we find in the armchair activism of Gap purchases, Starbuck’s charity, and Green consumption.

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy.

turned out en masse for a public town hall meeting in Toronto late last month, resulting in multiple interventions from record label executives (four from Warner Music alone).  Packing the room ensured that there was virtually nothing heard from education and consumer groups, many of whom could not even attend the town hall since all the tickets were scooped up in less than five days.

See the full post here.

The CBC appropriated a disappointing Associated Press article on the matter and ends with the following:

“It’s not the first time YouTube has been banned. The Australian state of Victoria recently banned it from government schools in a crackdown on cyber-bullying after a gang of male students videotaped their assault on a 17-year-old girl on the outskirts of Melbourne.”

It is already troublesome to see that schools are banning YouTube access, danah boyd writes on similar problematic practices involving the Deleting Online Predators Act in the United States. It is always unfortunate that, as my grandmother would say “one bad apple has to spoil the lot”.

However, I think the linking the particular instance of assault to the large-scale restriction of communication technologies because a video was taken badly by a government that sends people to prison for “Insulting Turkishness”. I recoil at the notion of the assault on the 17 year old, and certainly would want the perpetrators to come to justice. But I certainly don’t equate posting a video of someone hurling an insult at a historical figure in the category of a crime, and certainly it doesn’t warrant restricting the freedoms of the Turkish citizenry to free access to the Internet – but unfortunately the Turkish government does.

This illustrates the very slippery slope that comes with considering too heavy-handed regulation of communications technologies.  At points it may be useful to monitor activity (such as porn in schools, or bullying) but not to the point of shutting down access to these sites.  In the case of the Turksih, it’s just another excercise in exerting control over the population, a common practice inTurkey, where the events of early 20th C Armenian Genocide are not even taught in Turkish schools (not even without the term genocide) thus prohibiting informed debate.  If governments shut down access to the opinions of those with whom they disagree, then effective debate is nullified – which, of course, would be a reasonable goal if you were into controlling your citezenry.  Of course internet restriction is nothing new at the level of the nation-state, remember Google China’s capitulation? See the difference?

Todayszaman, an English-language Turkish newspaper had the following headline in their online version: “YouTube broadcasts Greek marches full of hatred toward Turks”. This reads like it lays the blame for the videos at the feet of YouTube, as if they had a content meeting and decided “Yes, yes, we’ll lead with the Greek anti-Turk marches today.” The article goes on to translate the lyrics of a song reportedly videotaped as sung by a Greek military unit:

There was a ship, a tank-carrying ship. It left from Volos to plant fear. It goes to the shores of Little Asia (Turkey). To spread fire and ashes all over Turkey. It was full of sea marines. They blew the heads of any Turks they could find into the air. The heroes died opening the road to Hagia Sophia. I will march to Hagia Sophia, take off the Turkish caliphate sign and plant a cross there. Only then will God shed light on İstanbul and the Greek national march will ring from every corner.

I don’t really know what much of that actually means, but it certainly sounds like a little religious nationalism to me!

The Guardian indicates that there were other insults, including accusations that Ataturk was homosexual, and that so are the Turks themselves. So not only is the Turkish government against insults in general, they also have a deep-seeded homophobia, which of course doesn’t surprise me since they are willing to enact bans on communications technology, deny genocide, and imprison dissenters.

So after reading all of that, I found this blog, a pro-Turkish tourism site where the writer has used links to YouTube videos in order to promote tourism in Turkey.

I guess the YouTube execs should have led with those.

Or this. (and read the comments, they’re priceless)

Get the whole deck! (1MB, PDF)

Basically it asks a bunch of questions about your surfing habits as related to finding out about music, communicating with fans, and filesharing.  There is an introductory page here and you can read the full thesis proposal PDF here.  I hope that you might take the time to fill out the survey, the more info the better!!

In other news, I was inspired by my friend Basil who asked: “Are dissident voices silenced?” to write a bit about democracy and dissent.  This is what I came up with…

To my understanding “democracy” as a concept has always meant (especially in the Republican [not the party] or Federative senses) the development of an axis of trust where I, as an elector, trust reasonably that my elected representative will make decisions in accordance with my own ethics, will represent the desires of the geographic region in which I live, etc., etc. I have never really taken democracy to mean the “direct rule of the people” or rule by majority consensus for that matter, which are often the contexts in which it is understood now. Of course, we can talk of the principals of democracy, and I believe in addition to the reasonable execution of governmental duties, that at the heart of the democratic ideal is this idea of trust. Indeed, the reason that I think we are in a state of democratic haemorrhaging is that over time those who have gained the trust of the electorate have abused it so much that it has become the norm – hence the endemic mistrust of politicians of any stripe. Perhaps one of the fundamental flaws of democracy is the profound belief it places in the notion that human beings are essentially trustworthy; it seems like the whole enterprise hinges on this.

My first thought when I read the questions was “what constitutes a dissident voice?” or “what types of dissidence?” Indeed, the contract established between electorates and their representatives suggests that it is a compromise of sorts, within which it is agreed that certain types of dissidence are not given voice, while others are permitted (e.g. the “dissent” of paedophilia is silenced while the “dissent” of those who are pro-privatisation of health care is not). Of course, I understand this to be part of the way in which allowing for the public airing of disagreement can actually reinforce the status quo of power by making a powerful elite seem open to dissent, while really allowing it to be mainly a social safety valve of sorts. In any case, it might be actually impossible to truly “silence” (in the active sense implied by the question) any type of social or political dissent, this is borne out in the numerous grotesque and abhorrent actions that human beings are capable of (disregarding, for the moment, issues of sociopathy and mental illness – even still, doesn’t “mental illness” imply a normative state of mental health?).

Michel de Certeau develops an interesting notion of dissent surrounding the idea of “La Perruque”, essentially meaning “work one does for oneself in the guise of work done for an employer” (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984). In this way he suggests that dissent against the production/profit driven aspects of labour and capitalism are destabilised when, for example, someone uses company time to make photocopies of posters for their band’s gig, or uses their trades skills to repair or create something for one of their co-workers. In this moment, the purpose of the labour is shifted away from the direct relationship to the company’s well-being, and instead moves into a parallel “gift economy” based less on the growth of capital and more on exchange- or use-values. It is something completely unrelated to the idea of working for the good of the corporation. Of course, de Certeau acknowledges that at times, La Perruque is tolerated, a blind eye turned, by “the management” because it is understood that, so long as it doesn’t impede corporate progress too much, then it keeps the workers happy in thinking that their pulling one over on the boss. Now we see the parallels with charity and permissible dissent.

I think what we are really talking about is access to the public political spectrum. Perhaps we are less worried in this moment in the abstract of “which dissent, by who, and in the interests of whom?” In this sense then I think we are absolutely bound up in the flow of information, what counts as knowledge, and how these things are mobilised. Stephen Lax suggests that while access to information has certainly provided greater awareness, public action on this information has largely remained stable, with things like the Internet simply strengthening the resolve and making more efficient the political activities of the already involved. Not to say in necessarily reinforces the status quo, but the suggestion is that if you were already pro-environment, your tools are just better now; if you were already apathetic or disengaged you have remained so. (Lax, in Web Studies, Horsley & Gauntlett, 2004) That said, Naomi Klein, in her Francis-Fukuyama-inspired “Farewell to the End of History” suggests that:

[…] recent mass protests would have been impossible without the Internet, what has been overlooked is how the communication technology that facilitates these campaigns is shaping the movement in its own image. Thanks to the Net, mobilizations are able to unfold with sparse bureaucracy and minimal hierarchy; forced consensus and laboured manifestos are fading into the background, replaced instead by a culture of constant, loosely structured and sometimes compulsive information-swapping (Naomi Klein, “Farewell To ‘The End Of History’ http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/Klein.htm)

This does kind of get back to question of “which types of dissent”, placing in opposition the notion of universal consensus towards a “cause” (like all lefties believe this…, and all righties believe that…) and the more modern notion of dispersed and tangentially related social concerns. I think what’s key in this statement is the idea that modern dissenting voices in a sense mimic the technology that enables them (OR, is it the other way around, or a combination of both? I prefer this).

I think that dissident voices haven’t been “silenc-ed”. I’d like to add though that there are actions on the part of powerful elites which are having various degrees of success in “silenc-ing” these voices, and also that there are many voices out there that for some reason or other (and not always because of the actions of the elite, sometimes as a result of their own apathy) are “silen-t”.

Thoughts, anyone, given the recent US elections, and the impending provincial municipal ones?