The only way I can respond to the events unfolding in Lebanon is to join the worry and panic of my own extended family and friends. Yes, “other” people have their own “days the world changed”, but they’re more like yet more moments that the world has continued to turn. As I said earlier:
When the London tube bombings happened in July, I panicked like many others, thinking of who I knew in London. When one is inextricably bound up in the links that occur in the web of Anglophone countries, one obviously feels these events — not just in terms of a generalised sympathy or solidarity, but in terms of the real, intimately lived relationships that one might have with certain people internationally. One looks up friends, or they check in, etc. When you live in a country that has a lingering imperial relation to Britain and membership in the advanced capitalist world of nation-states, like I do, this reaction is inescapable, whatever your critique of those relations. Because I have friends there.
But part of my own response to the incident in London also reminded me of something I witnessed in the wake of 11 September, 2001: the assumption of a “we”, and the associated assumption that only “we” have a virtual sphere of everyday concern and affiliation that turns to viscerally sympathetic panic when disaster strikes. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, I saw this played out in various online communities and in the blogosphere: the panic of looking for friends and loved ones, and of frantic checkings in, was often lubricated in its public expression by a kind of structural narcissism — a narcissism that implicitly precluded the possibility that when horrible things happen outside of the Anglophone world, say in the Middle East, people there might also undergo a similar panic, and be frantically trying to reach relatives and friends. These “other people” also live in the pores of the Anglophone world — when shit goes down in the Middle East, which is often, there is always a frantic concern played out within the large Arab diasporas in Australia, Britain, the United States, Canada, etc.
With this realisation comes the reflexive recognition that there is a Western disapora, an imagined community whose ethno-national configuration is constantly riven by crisis, but which is usually rendered invisible by its insistent perspectival self-centering.
I think this cuts much deeper than the casual observation that in public discourse in the Anglophone world, “some lives are figured as more important than others”, because I’m talking not just about the values of “propaganda” or “media discourse”, but about the intimate, affective webs of lived social relationships and their abjection/denial in the space of the everyday. Underneath the Eurocentric notion that “other countries don’t have a civil society”, there is also the subconcept that the semi-intimate zone where private meets public — in a non-institutional sense — simply doesn’t exist for “cultural others”, for whom a state of animalistic barbarity is assumed to be natural.
The “Western diaspora’s” default whiteness is one diaspora amongst others. Acknowledging this might go a long way towards building more adequate concepts of solidarity.
[ tags: bombing, diaspora, israel, lebanon, public-sphere, publics, whiteness ]
hi ben — melissa h from sydney uni —
i hope family and friends are safe and sound. i have extended family in lebanon too. you wouldn’t believe the rhetoric on tv here about “getting aussies home” — it’s as though Cronulla never happened.
i ran across your blog somehow and twigged that it’s you. i hope hong kong has been good. kate sends her best.
Let’s all hope. Are you guys still in New York?
nope, sad to say, new york is over. teaching starts up next week. it’s always a bloody awful time to come home these days.
Good post.
I wonder how long before the Cronulla rhetoric mentioned by Melissa opens up into “we are taking our sweet time because of all the gang-rapes that they commit”. I give it… 48 hours.
Hi Ben, thanks for the post - it really sparked a lot of reflection for me. Some other notes on Lebanon and Australian responses are on my blog. Hope friends and family are safe.
Thanks Mark. Sorry about the spam-filtering — it automatically grabs comments with more than a certain number of links.
Christian, I’ve been trying to avoid Australian media while I’ve been in HK, but perhaps I’ll just have to indulge in the horror. :)
i remember being about 11 years old. the war in former yugoslavia broke out. Everyone we knew would watch the news to find out what was happening. Trying to displace the anxiety, the trepitadation. People were desperate for pieces of information as to what was happening, how far the front line was from the village where they grew up.
They would plan their channel surfing, getting as much news in as possible, trying to de-veil the unknown. Flick through 7-10, stay glued to SBS. Video tape the extended report on ABC, so that we could watch it again & again. Channel surfing became an important skill in the task of linking migrants to their home communities. We cross ourselves, praying for hope; we channel surf, searching for the vindication of our hope.
everyone ‘we’ knew would partake in this practice. But who is this ‘we’?? Is it yogo’s? Surely not. It is a ‘we’ that is neither west, nor east, south or north. it is a limbo that looks as if it were a junk yard of so many other suppoedly uniform cultures. No Yuogo-land, no Jugoslavija. That is a dead land, a non-place, ‘the’ failed project. Now we are ‘croatian’. It is the brave new forever. An ancient history was found for a place that had only begun to exist. Maps could not be drawn because we were yet to define the countries borders. It was freedom with an insidious undercurrent.
It was the birth of the nation. It was the birth of the ‘we’. Or perhaps what you have so aptly (and eloquently) called structural narcissism. Mourning, grief, anxiety, & searching are all so inherantly part of the nation, of the ‘we’. They are constitutive elements that excite the affectual elements of identity production. The unique arousal & displacement that comes with such trauma constructs us. Like scar tissue that remains after a severe wound, so does cultural/national identity sick out after a trauma, letting it self be known.
There was an old slavic folk tale of of the construction of a town that required the sacrifice of the wife of the young prince to applease the spirits of the land. In many ways this mirrors our psyche’s own need to generate communities, separated by their own mythical walls based in the principles of loss. The spirit of the dead constiutes the life of the nation. The nation is the living dead. The nation. The dead. The mourning.