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Hallste.in RSS summary of updates to Bjørn Hallstein's private website - Hallste.in http://www.hallste.in Sat, 18 May 2013 19:41:03 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 Hallste.in http://www.hallste.in Imagined Eternities: Bounded and Endangered http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=112
But what do all these eternities have in common? They are endangered - by poaching, overpopulation corruption and modernization - and in need of our protection. This may be a last chance to see it, we are sometimes told. The rhino. The mountain gorillas. Even the lion. And with a sense of urgency, we purchase our safari. And once we are there, we are told to chip in to preserve it for future generations. Any little donation may help. Even 10 Shillings for the warden's tea. And we pay up, feeling a little guilty at our own wealth in the face of the poverty that we've just seen.

And, already, we have arrived at contradiction, though we hardly realize it. How can eternity be spatially bounded? How can it ever be in need of protection? And what happened to it - was it ruined by the great hunting parties, back when Teddy Roosevelt and his son killed 500 beasts? Recent poachers? And is there a difference? The most recent record I have found of a white, professional big game hunter in Kenya was from 1981.

There are, I believe, two significant and related misunderstandings underlying this entire misconception. The first is the idea of eternal and pristine nature; the second is the imperialistic fault of ignoring agency that is not your own. The idea of untouched nature and the noble savage who lived within it on the one hand; the failure to realize that this was not a static entity through time, only to altered by the imposition of civilized man, on the other. This basic dichotomy - the pristine, uncivilized and eternal on the one hand, and the changing, civilized and dangerous on the other - underlies an impressive range of discourses on Africa, both those who tell us that white man contributed positively towards sparking the meagre development that currently is, and those who tell us that he ruined it forever: the texts of the classical travelers (Karen Blixen, Ernest Hemingway), the speech of the tourist guides, the advertising material from the tour operators, the TV-programmes on National Geographic, the informational campaigns of the great aid organizations ('Only you can save this child!'), the press releases from European development ministries.

Foucault has famously written that "power and knowledge directly imply one another, such that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations." In no context is this more evidently true than one where intellectuals, locals, laymen, the media, civil society and states all produce the same truth. Where all instances of power (and some more) produce the same knowledge.

What we should be careful in suggesting - and notice that Foucault does not suggest it either - is that this is by design. Knowledge, according to Foucault, is always an interpretation of physical facts and there are always alternative possible interpretations. That interpretations are dependent on power and not arbitrary does not mean that there is a conspiracy to uphold them. Rather, it means that the various institutions that contribute to and reproduce them influence each other. Some of them - the tourist industry, the aid organizations - may do so because they benefit from it; others - the travelers writing memoirs, the journalists, the development researchers - may do so because it is how they perceive the world. Regardless, the end result is the establishment of a set of truths that are self-contradictory.

Bounded eternities. People without agency. A nature that is distinct from mankind.

So how should we understand the place that we come to? Africa. In terms, I think, of local history rather than grand narratives. A tourist I met in a bar told me in great detail of a traditional village she had been to. There was no hint of modern interference, she told me. Families had lived there for generations, farming the land and keeping domestic animals. Here hadn't even been a tractor in that area. The village, I happen to know, one in the former White Highlands, did not exist prior to Uhuru in 1963. She had failed (or been fooled to fail) to appreciate local histories; the ability of non-Europeans to unroot themselves from ancestral lands; the possibility of a landscape changing. Africa, remember, is ahistoric and eternal.

In the feminist anthropology of the Abrahamic religions, a strand of thought spearheaded by Carol Delaney and a few others, suggests that the ethos they foster leaves room for only one generative principle: the man. The woman is a passive recipient of male sperm and a place for this to develop into a child - woman is to man as soil is to seed - and like we thus fail to appreciate the active role of women in procreation, we often fail to recognize the active role of our Others in shaping history and the world. This 'we' might have been extended over the last hundred years, to include women, individual Africans and a few others, but it is still too narrow a category. Agency in history may not even be an exclusively human trait, but that is a very different line of thought. For now, suffice it to say that histories are always predominantly local.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Postcolonialism Discursive Explorations Anthropology and Philosophy Aid and Development Africa and Angola http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=112 Tue, 15 May 2012 07:03:03 +0100 Beyond the Limits of Language: Sociality, Pleasure and Happiness http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=111
In a parallel conviction, one that I often forget or consciously ignore so I can do other things, I am convinced that there is also a physical world beyond language and that there are non-linguistic processes going on. Even deep within poststructural traditions, older concepts reappear. Dialectics is one of these concepts.

Some time ago, I suggested that the notion of dialectics can be used to explain how happiness and satisfaction can exist in social spaces of ideological suppression. Really, I concluded, the notion of ideological suppression is rather a matter of interpretation than a precise analytical concept. A social construction on two levels, if you like. I did this by showing how even contemporary Norway, perhaps the overall least suppressive social setting that we have documentation of to date, can be analyzed in these terms: how I, employed this summer as a low-level government bureaucrat, spend most of my time working for the smooth operation of the grand organization that is the state, and how I, when I did not work for the state, can be thought of as r & ring for the sole purpose of being able and willing to work for the state again on Monday morning. The dark vision of society thus suggested, it seems, is similar to that suggested by Don Draper, the fictional advertising agent of Mad Men, when he tells a woman that love is, indeed, just another of the measures of ideological suppression - a concept invented by cynics like himself to bend the will of the masses:

The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me, to sell nylons. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts.

Don Draper, I believe, could not be more wrong. Love, together with other social events, is the main source of the constructions of our selves and, as such, a process that has consequences well beyond stimulating demand for stocking or making me willing to work for the state. With reference to the concept of the dividual as elaborated on in Marylin Strathern's The Gender of the Gift, I suggested in my note that happiness comes with the social construction of persons, primarily in the microcosm of the home:

the home that is repeated thousands of times through the cities and suburbs, but where each man is a husband, a father and somebody's son; each woman a wife, a mother and a daughter.

Evidently, this is a situation where the impositions of social control are transcended: the bureaucrat is so much more than a bureaucrat when he is a husband to his wife or a son to his father. This something that he is, which we can denote by 'unique subject' or 'loved subject' for the lack of better words, is produced in dialectical relations - relations, that is, that exist outside of language and other symbolic systems. They are, ultimately, fleshly.

The idea is certainly not as new or revolutionary as it might at first seem. Consider the Lacanian concept of jouissance - ineffable pleasure: pleasure that cannot be brought into words and that can thus be felt but not known - extending beyond language by definition and in Lacan's formulation also beyond pleasure, approaching pain. It has sexual overtones. Jouissance, as I understand it, denotes the intuitive human pleasure in coitus even more than intimate relations more generally, and in Kristeva's reanalysis, jouissance is related to the notion of the abject as that which is outside the symbolic order and which thus inspires awe, fascination and fear. Abjection of the abject is a safeguard against being swallowed up by the linguistic or semiotic or social order: precisely a way of being something more than simply that which fills a societal role (bureaucrat, consumer …).

We are approaching the contradictions described in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents - between individual and society; desire and expectation; pleasure and morality - and their resolution. I am arguing that the contradictions thus brought forth are often solved in social interaction, and that jouissance, a means to a solution, is simultaneously the product of a dialectical relation between thesis and antithesis - between man and woman; mother and child; lover and loved - and a process that creates those entities. The out-of-language experience that jouissance is, however, can only be experienced when we transcend the rational and graspable: our individuality for our dividuality; our egos for our Others; language for emotion. Languages work to establish the very order that we work to transcend; they create the order we wish to escape; they threaten our existence as autonomous beings to produce social beings. Languages are social in two senses: simultaneously cause and effect of the social in being prerequisites for most social forms as well as social products.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Anthropology and Philosophy http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=111 Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:17:28 +0100 Gonzo: Dr. Hunter S. Thompson's Documentary Form http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=110 Gonzo, as this genre of writing is often called, is then thought characterized by its psychedelia: the subjective experience before the objective truth; the crazed, bizarre, often exaggerated interpretations; the confusion of fact and fiction. Stylistically, these are key features. They cannot, however, by themselves explain the immense success of the good doctor as a journalist, writer and public persona.

Hunter S. Thompson was writing his most famous works in a time and place of great social turmoil in California and, indeed, the world at large during the transition between the 1960's and 70's. In parallel to the social and political implications of all that happened in that era, significant changes were also beginning to take place in the social sciences and the humanities as the post-modern and all that it entailed was developing. Hunter S. Thompson, I believe, can be seen as a predecessor to what would come: an early critical scholar, if you like. A proto-postmodernist.

Let me explain. The good doctor makes a muddle of fact and fiction, and he certainly refuses to report objectively in any sense of the word. Hateful as he was of conservative Americans and Nixon and a lot of other things, he wrote to expose his version and interpretation of truth. Think, for example, about the injustice and racism he was conveying from the perspective of the oppressed in Strange Rumblings in Aztlan (and think, in turn, about later key texts on partial perspectives and partial truths and empowerment research); the striking descriptions of a gathering of law enforcement personell out of touch with everything that has been going on in Part II of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (and compare this to what has been going on in the subject of criminology since); the political observations and great relevance of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ("… most accurate and least factual"). In his obituary for Richard Nixon, 'He Was a Crook', the good doctor himself reflects explicitly on the relation of his reporting to Truth:

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism - which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

This can be paraphrased, I think, almost directly into a passage in Maria Muhle's 'Notes on Documentary Realism' from the catalogue for the Hito Steyerl installation at Henie Onstad Art Centre in 2010, a note on the muddling of objectivity and subjectivity in her contemporary filmatic documentaries:

[Thompson's prose, like] Steyerl's abstract documentarism brings back a specific, affective identification to the image that seems essential for the understanding of contemporary documentary form - a form that collapses the simple opposition between (affective) identification on the one hand, and (neutral) distanciation on the other.

What Hunter S. Thompson does, and what makes his points so striking, is to suggest that this is not only possible: it is necessary. Gonzo, if that is the genre in which the good doctor wrote, must therefore be understood against a much broader backdrop than it often is. This is not solely about taking drugs or drinking and being an outsider inside; about being a troublemaker and writing about it. No - Gonzo is more than anything a way of relating to truth and a way of questioning all that is established. Gonzo was postmodern before postmodernism.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Literature http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=110 Sun, 18 Mar 2012 19:11:03 +0100 Zooropa http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=109 Zooropa gave me the first time I heard it - it was unlike anything I'd heard before, but I was already certain that this would change everything and nothing all at once.

I was probably sixteen at the time: a bored teenager in a European suburb. But this wasn't me, I kept telling myself: I had larger dreams; I would make it to become somebody and I would leave this boring life behind; I would experience the world and come back different from these drowsy neighbors of mine. I would be better, I decided, and listening to Zooropa really took that to a new level by making it seem legitimate. Zooropa captures the essence of the boredom I was undergoing of being nobody but longing to be somebody, and it captures it well.

But how? Stylistically. Zooropa is truly the soundtrack of that life, with persistent rhythms, at times provocative but never offbeat, and synthesizers and vocals all over the place. It is as if the meaningful variations of treble and voice are battling the meaningless rhythms for predominance throughout the album - and almost making it. Almost, but not quite. The rhythm, to a nearly nightmarish extent, has a way of persisting, like the rhythm of daily life forces itself on the suburban dweller: the eight hour work day, the seven day week, the five weeks a year off work, retirement age.

The thoroughgoing theme is how we continuously try to break this rhythm to be different, but how we all attempt to be different in very similar ways. The rhythm pains us, I think, and perhaps more so while we are still young. It reminds us that we are mere dependents of society and that even when we try escape it, we just get more entangled in it. The protagonist of 'Stay (Faraway, So Close)' - a character seeking meaning in what I imagine as a bleak, grey city in the dusk hours - buys cigarettes, perhaps the ultimate symbol of rebellion, but an issue with the change refuses her to ever indulge in the fantasy she is buying into:

Green light, 7Eleven,
You stop in for a pack of cigarettes
You don't smoke
Don't even want to
Hey now, check your change

A lot can be said about this character, and I better not. Let me rather return to the observation that I identified with a simple interpretation of her when I was sixteen - along with the other protagonists seeking meaning in meaningless lives whose tales are told on Zooropa. There is little you can actually do when you're sixteen years. It's an inherently boring age, and quite meaningless. Two years later I would be in university; I would be making my own money in my first job; I would spend that money traveling; eventually sitting in bars in faraway places, longing home to the people and places I never realized I loved back then.

I would have acquired a liking for Johnny Cash, the author of songs about longing to the home that I once longed away from and the performer of the final track on Zooropa. Indeed, the final three songs of the album are all different from those that precedes them - more down to earth; calmer; longing home from away (though home may here be a spiritual home rather than an earthly home) instead of away from home. And this is, indeed, how everything and nothing changes with Zooropa: a new and strange form of longing is introduced, a new and strange longing that is still a longing. The more things change, the more they stay the same - and the impatient traveler will always long for somewhere else.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Reviews http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=109 Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:57:30 +0100 We, the Intellectuals http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=108 What kind of moral authority … The old man clears his throat and raises his voice some: What kind of moral authority does it give, as you say, having been here?

The scene is absurd and discomforting - the old, suited-up men whose deepest conscience you have shocked with your mere existence. A traveler of the world; a cosmopolitan; a truly liberal individual - and here you are, in the middle of nowhere, being forced to defend yourself. Your position and your right to exist. Jesus! You thought your way of being could never offend anyone. And around you ... Around you - and this you know, though you cannot see it - the people of the forest (those child-like barbarians) are dancing and doing macabre things to hurt you. The magic may be metaphorical or it may be metonymical - you know that they've got your picture and they've got your hair because that little kid cut off some just the other day - and if you close your eyes you see the frightening collage of curious black faces and bright white eyes through your glass door. They're all in trance, all enchanted, all unconscious, and looking at you as if their messiah has come. And so you open your eyes screaming: Exterminate them all!

And when your eyes are open, you keep staring into the chest of this angry crowd of old men. The old men who are are trying to figure you out. Figure out who you are and what to do with you and what you can do for them. And here you are. You've certainly been here now, though perhaps not long enough. Away from your world of beautiful people, the world you detest, and you're here. Life, to most people, is a painful endeavor and it is this kind of pain that is being unraveled to you on this particular night. The pain. The suffering. This is the world of the unfortunate many - the place where those who do not qualify for life in the world of beautiful people are sent away to rot and disappear. Your mission here is to document it, though you haven't an idea how.

Some nights ago you sat on your verandah in front of your red brick villa overlooking endless cattle fields, like you sat in front of a tall, white mansion overlooking vast cotton fields last year - you sat on your verandah drinking aquavite with your friend. And on your verandah, drinking your aquavite - the water of life - he was speaking to you about the cynics he encounter in his work. It was a perfect night: still, warm and the moon was so bright that it was hardly dark at all. You could see the well-trimmed hedges and perfect lawns of your garden and you were both a little drunk because you had beer for dinner and because the bottle of aquavite is large. What he said made sense. These Goddamn cynics! We, the intellectuals work to change the world for the better and their speech is poison, killing every incentive to improve this world. It is our job as intellectuals, therefore, to stay away from the cynics. To observe them from a distance, but to detest them.

You remember the woman you saw by the pool in that far-away world of skyscrapers: the perfect body in a perfect bikini. A perfect tan. Jesus - she is probably the perfect lover as well, but so incredibly boring. So unknowing. So cynical. And she was by the pool when you went there. And her husband was inside in his suit making important decisions that affect us all and make him a lot of money.

The cynics. But you do get caught in their web of macabre hatred, hating them, and you avoid them like they avoid those whom they don't like: while they drink whisky in that far-away world of skyscrapers, possibly by the pool, you drink aquavite on your verandah. It doesn't do you much good - The anthropologist is drinking, and there are rumors that this will ruin his life - but you do it anyways to deal with what you encounter. The fear. The hatred. Wait … What you encounter or what you fabricate?

You move about in this world and you meet people. You produce knowledge from the encounters and you produce the encounters. All of them, and you produce them by being here. When the encounters turn bad, it is because you partake in making them bad. When the old men in suits and the childlike barbarians are infuriated by your presence, by your person, when they do macabre things to hurt you, it is because you infuriate them by being where you shouldn't be in the first place. The young teacher tried to tell you this - it's better, he said, to speak to other intellectuals. We, the intellectuals, understand.

But you wouldn't listen because you didn't understand. You don't want to understand. Being here, as you like to characterize your business, is important to you. It changes you, shapes you and fabricates you to embody this knowledge. You become the knowledge. This knowledge that nobody shares, that nobody can share, but which it will be your luxury to possess and to communicate forever. This, you tell the old men, this is the kind of moral authority it gives. This, you tell them, is what you seek.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Places (Stories of) Anthropology and Philosophy http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=108 Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:40:16 +0100 The American West http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=107
But how should we make sense of the American West? Semiotically speaking, that is. And the American West - no, the far West. Not the mid-West that Jacobshagen is concerned with. "Drive ten thousand miles across America and you will know more about the country than all the institutes of sociology and political science put together," the great sociologist Baudrillard wrote in America. Let's try - let's start in Montana and head South-West. By car, this time. And from Montana, up there by the Canadian border: The mythological place where the cattle trails ended, where Lonesome Dove ended - the culmination of the Western dream (and the culmination of dreams are powerful stuff), where your herds are finally safe from Mexican cattle-thieves and where your son could finally settle.

But Montana is uneventful these days and you want to head South. And no wonder, you think when you drive through the small towns of Wyoming, that the Americans needed their pick-up trucks. How else could they have organized these spaces; how else could they have turned spaces into places? The pick-up trucks that you meet are all filled with things, or they are battered and beautiful as if they have always been until now. The young rancher setting up a new paddock and the old cowboy, driving slowly with his dog in his bed, are both epitomes of the American spirit. The young rancher is the keeper of the West and the old cowboy, where he progresses slowly along some county road to make church in time or to tend to whatever he might have left after a long life of working, is the true American hero of today: the last heir of the Wild West. This, you know, is the real America, and you continue heading south.

And then, no wonder, you think, as you drive through Colorado, that Americans love their V8's. How else could a car perform over the mountain passes of the Rocky Mountains? And when you reach the grandeur of the Grand Tetons; when you see the buffalo and the grizzly bears; when you drive along the mountains for hours to end, you know why the cars had to be enormous. It makes sense, then, with all the power and mass. And it makes no sense to worry about emissions in such a great, lone landscape; no sense to worry about the price of oil when you hear the calm rhythm of the pumpjacks day and night; nothing makes sense but the grandeur of your vehicle. A grandeur matched only by the landscape outside your windshield.

And no wonder, you think when you have finally crossed the Rockies and look over the landscapes of Utah, that the Americans built cars that looked like spaceships throughout the 1950's: if they were to penetrate this endless scenery, and they were, nothing ordinary could suffice. No VW Beetle and no Citroën 2CV. Certainly not. The grandeur of everything calls for proper cars with long hoods and hood ornaments; two-tone paint and chrome detailing; tail fins and wrap-around rear windows. Serious cars for serious people on serious trips. If you're heading to California, and you were, you'd go through this and this is another planet. You know few things for sure, but this you know: Utah ain't ordinary.

But you get to the Nevada border and no wonder, you think, when you roam south through Nevada, that Americans also love topless cars. "As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top," Dr. Gonzo says in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He also recommends buying cocaine. And he is absolutely right. A very fast car with no top is the only sensible vehicle in this warm, dry climate. A very fast car and a slight high. The wind in your hair. The sun. The endless flats. (The bats?). The reddish dirt. And Hoover Dam: what kind of madman's idea was that?! But this is a place that could only be tamed by a madman, so why not be one?

But you get to Barstow and to Los Angeles and no wonder, you think, when you reach the outset of Californian Highway 1, that the Americans had to send people space. It all ends here, peacefully, in the Pacific Ocean whose waves roll along the shore and whose mist turns everything terribly cold at night. It is where Captain Beefheart eventually settled. It is the end of the world, according to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and of our Western civilization. But endings are inherently un-American: they seek new beginnings. New forms of endlessness. Outer space - and that's it. Outer space.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Places (Stories of) http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=107 Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:58:32 +0100 What is sex and what is AIDS? http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=106 A few years back, I suggested that AIDS might affect moralistic discourses about gender and sexuality, simply because it makes some types of behavior more dangerous than they used to be: promiscuity, while frowned upon in many cultural systems, can now also be lethal. I suggested this, but back then I did not have the data to back the argument empirically.

Still today, I am only familiar with a very limited selection of that extensive literature: notably texts in the tradition of Emily Martin's (1990) now classic work on AIDS, immunology and popular conceptions of the immune system in the United States on the one hand, and work by various authors on AIDS and morality in different African contexts on the other. Those two branches of work may seem to go in different directions - to explore two different discourses, if you like - and while Martin shows how bodies are understood through nation state- and war-metaphors in light of immunologic research, social research on AIDS in Africa is often tied to religious and moralistic discourses. AIDS, then, is understood as a punishment for immorality, and morality as well as the word of God becomes key points in sexual education:

"That is why we have seen that whenever young people feel aroused, they have sex like animals. But what is required here? Self-control … Relationships between boys and girls are not bad, okay? But this relationship ought to be based on whose word?"

On the word of God, of course, which in turn means sexual abstinence until marriage. The quote is from Amy Stambach's (2010: 126-133) account of a lesson on The Sanctity of the Life of Youth held by a pastor in a Tanzanian school.

In practice, however, I believe that we will often find individuals in some middle ground between our two discourses as information may be sought from multiple sources - from local medical or religious authorities, from missionaries, medical relief personnel, teachers, public information campaigns, or books and pamphlets of various origins and ages - that, again, are variously positioned between drawing on religious and scientific knowledge. Yesterday, I came over a blackboard that had been used for a year eight class in christian and religious education in a rural school in Kenya. The subject of the lesson had been 'Sexual Misuse':

… 8) When people don't obey God's command on sexual abuse they get God's punishment or wrath upon their lives. 9) When David committed adultery to Bathsheba he felt guilt. 10) Annan felt guilty and stressed after raping Tamar. 11) Abortion is a crime which can also lead to the death of the victim (person who is doing it). 12) Some of the examples of the symptoms of STIs are
- pain
- sores in the genitals and unusual foul smelling discharge
13) Christians should avoid sexual immorality to protect being judged by God. 14) The youth can avoid sexual immorality by
- not reading or watching pornographic material and films
- avoiding wrong companies, etc.
15) Youth should learn to be responsible. 16) Youth should learn to avoid sex before marriage. 17) Sex before marriage is a sin.

The broad message is familiar from Stambach's account, though it has been made in a slightly different manner: it incorporates practical knowledge about sexually transmitted infections, but frames this within strict religious prescription. This is again a form of middle ground where diseases are discussed in terms of a practical and medical discourse, but they given meaning through religious discourses. Nadine Beckmann (2010), writing on ZAPHA+, a Zanzibari HIV support club, illustrates in another way how this middle ground looks:

"HIV infection in Zanzibar is believed to result from immoral behaviour, but manifests itself as damu chafu (‘dirty’, contaminated blood) and HIV-positive people acknowledge the dangers of mixing it with others’ blood through sexual intercourse. The difficulties posed by sex in the time of AIDS are reflected in frequent demands for education on ‘life skills’, including sex education and ways to negotiate sex with partners."

The members of ZAPHA+ obviously mix the religious discourses commonly attributed to Africans and the scientific discourses whose impact Emily Martin was describing two decades ago to make sense of their condition, but also to act on it. The group emphasizes 'responsible sex', a term which draws on moral prescriptions for legitimate sexual encounters as well as strategies to avoid transfer of infection during such encounters. "Responsible sexual behaviour does not necessarily translate into ‘safe sex’ in the Western sense (i.e. condom use) but, rather, implies sex that complies with socially prescribed norms." Within relationships, precautions based on an understanding of transmission of HIV as based on the mixing of bodily fluids are employed.

What I am arguing is that religious discourses on sexually transmitted infections such as HIV and sexual morality do not necessarily run counter to scientific discourses on bodily fluids and responsible sex, but in many ways represents another and vastly different dimension. Both discourses provide abstract explanations of HIV - morally laden ones about punishment or chemically informed ones about the mixing of bodily fluids - that translate into practical ideas for avoiding or handling sexuality and infections. The explanations make sense in their own interpretative frameworks, the prescriptions and strategies suggested would work if followed and creative combinations are certainly possible. Sexual abstinence may seem unrealistic to some, and so may the use of condoms. Where neither is favored but both preached, creative middle positions will ensue.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Anthropology and Philosophy Aid and Development Africa and Angola http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=106 Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:44:35 +0100 The Physical World is Still There: Enron and Other Things in Retrospect http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=105
This capacity, I argue, is quite a lot more important to our lives than we like to think. Because consumers - myself included - focus mainly on user interfaces and new functions. Great companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are admired for ingenious concepts and intuitive software, but their businesses are also more than that. Much more. Consider the server capacity - the physical capacity - required to power the nearly ten billion monthly searches of the Google search engines or the over 700 billion minutes of user-time spent per month on Facebook. And think about the energy needs of such a structure. And this is where the future lies, we are often told. In energy. Non-carbon, renewable, clean energy. This is the one thing we know about future markets: that energy will be in demand. (A few years back, we also knew that real estate prices would continue to rise forever. We no longer know that).

So what about the energy companies? Ten years ago today, Enron filed for bankruptcy. A business that mere months earlier had seemed both visionary and robust - it was named 'America's Most Innovative Company' by Fortune Magazine six years in a row and praised by labor organizations and for giving exceptional pensions - turned out to be a hollow shell. Like American banks and financial institutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Enron in late 2001 turned out to contain very little real value:

… No machinery to produce physical things, no stock of products, but rather computers and competence to acquire and sell metaphysical assets in alarming quantities and at an alarming rate.

Like much of the financial wealth was based on derivative trading and subprime packages that were nothing like they seemed to be, Enron's wealth was largely based on future trading and creative accounting. The Enron story and the Californian electricity crisis that unfolded in parallel were strange phenomena. A great company fell into disrepute and was reduced to nothing over a mere half year; one of the world's greatest energy markets was falling apart as revenues skyrocketed and (!) power companies went bankrupt. While we should not confuse crookery and normal affairs, these ten year old stories can serve to illustrate some of the paradoxes of our contemporaneity: that business owners and administrators seem to lack any understanding of their businesses; that investors can make great amounts of money on companies whose sources of income they do not know; that very little can be wrapped up and sold as if it was very much; indeed, that we see formalities and finishes, but very little of what happens behind the drapery. It is, after all, elegant solutions and innovations that end up as great businesses in our times: the Google algorithm; Facebook's linking profiles to real names; Apple's flawless user interfaces. None of these companies ever invented anything substantially new, but all of them have revolutionized the way we use already existing technologies. Enron, too, like banks selling subprime packages, found creative ways to make profits from selling a quite ordinary product - a strategy that seems less fortunate when selling undifferentiated products (as, indeed, electricity is).1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=105 Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:15:52 +0100 Fear and Loathing in Oslo http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=104
Men - and depending on who you ask, men with immigrant backgrounds - are doing unspeakable things to our women. To our daughters, girlfriends, wives and friends: beating them senseless and viciously penetrating them in parks all over our city. Last week, a peaceful gathering against sexual assaults, as they called it, was soon followed by yet another rape in a Oslo park. A young woman was walking home or to an after party or whatever when she was assaulted in the dark. The details have eluded me, luckily.

In the aftermath of this, yet another assault (29 sexual assaults and 22 attempted assaults have been reported to the Oslo Police so far this year), civilians are organizing vigilance committees and the private security companies are sending their men into public service. Taxi drivers have been instructed to see their customers enter their homes after drop off, video surveillance is being discussed in positive terms again and new street lights are put up. Creative solutions flourish and originate from private persons, politicians and everything in between. The far right calls for stricter punishment and increased police budgets, while the Minister of Justice holds press conferences and launches action plans with immediate effect. The bottom line is even more police officers walking the streets at night. No rapes were reported this weekend.

Oslo is a safe city, and we are not giving up on that. It is a premise for public discourse, not an empirical statement. It is unthinkable, I think, for Norwegians to surrender public space to violence and crime as has happened in so many other cities - most notably in São Paulo by Teresa Caldeira's account. We do not want to erect walls or to live behind guarded gates, but neither do we want to adjust our lives to that which goes on around us. Instead, we look to the state and ask how they (or it) can alter the premises of our lives so that we can live it by our lusts and desires in every instance.

And how can the state do that? By extending, of course: by employing more people to do more things. By looking into every aspect of our lives and by controlling them through video surveillance, police patrols, mandatory DNA tests and whatnot … And that ain't no future. Or maybe, but it is a sinister future and a nightmarish vision.

Neither will it work as intended, I am fairly sure, because we need to work out these problems ourselves - not by dressing differently or staying sober or losing all faith in people, but by organizing our lives and our late nights in more responsible manners. In Oslo, we already accept exorbitant rents and bar prices - perhaps taking taxis home should also be within the natural order of things? In Norway, as things have become, we are all rugged individualists - perhaps we should be better at looking after each other? Walking each other home? If we are to take the streets back, as we were half a year ago and still are today, why do we send these young girls to do it all alone?

There is a danger, here, of blaming the victims. Rapes are nobody's responsibility but the rapist and all that - and this is rather to suggest that assaults very often occur in situations that should never have been in the first place. But there are usually multiple reasons for the way things turn out - multiple reasons and multiple actors - and victims are those unfortunate ones who, at the end of a long array of events, end up in those vulnerable situations. It is the array of events that needs to be changed so that alternatives exist - and we are all responsible for that. We are, but not the state.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=104 Sun, 06 Nov 2011 21:24:34 +0100 Gadaffi Killed http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=103
The order of things had been reversed - Gadaffi, who mere months ago called the rebels 'rats,' was himself found hiding underground among filth and rubbish. After a life in palaces and riches, Gadaffi died right by a highway drainage, and Gadaffi, who mere months ago was ruling a regime that extorted brutal violence on its opponents, was now himself the victim of such savagery. But why this violence? Why this barbary?

Something strange happens, it seems, upon the death of such strong men, and I am reminded of Saddam Hussein's capture from a hole in the ground in 2003 (also he was said to be hiding 'like a rat'), his execution in 2006 and Osama bin Laden's death earlier this year. I think of the tales I read of Jonas Savimbi's death in 2002, of Adolf Hitler's suicide in 1945, Benito Mussolini's execution two days earlier - of the abuse of his corpse - and of Joseph Stalin's last hours in 1953.

All these men, like Colonel Gadaffi, have caused immense human suffering. Their deaths are mere replays of the deaths they have caused over and over throughout their lives, and yet I end up feeling sympathy for the sorry human remains that are photographed and shown to the world; for the weak shades of formerly strong men that pass out of this world. In the tales of their final moments - in the spoken words and in the tales that the photos tell - we get a sense of their humanity. At last. Of bin Ladens young lover sacrificing herself for him (voluntarily nor not) and of Gadaffi reduced to a terrified, confused and deluded old man: "What is the matter? What's going on? What do you want?"

"Don't shoot. Don't shoot!"

And where is the dignity? Gadaffi's words repeat in my mind like visions in a nightmare. What terrifies me, I guess, is the reduction of this strong man to a child; of this perpetrator to a victim; of this icon of a cause to a human being. What terrifies me, I guess, is the intensity of the hate that he must have felt. A great organization of loyalists has faded away and he was left to face his enemies alone. Did he ever really have friends? And the bleeding Gaddafi, hauled out of drainage pipes - could he have been a threat to anyone?

It is easy to understand the hatred that decades of oppression and violence has fostered. It is easy to understand, but hard to accept. And perhaps we should not accept it, for does not true good imply granting rights even to whose who deny those same rights to you? Would not true good imply a humane handling even of the representatives of evil? I am tempted to conclude that what happened was terrible, though I do not know of a better alternative. And this, therefore, is to remember that justice is sometimes impossible.
1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=103 Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:05:12 +0100 An Ontology of Drunkenness http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=102
- You should not write when you're drunk, she tells me. Like I should not drive when I drink or facebook when I have been drinking or call all the girls in my contact list when I have been drinking too much. I should not discuss the money I lent a friend when we drink together and I should take care not to drink to much at family dinners. I should not write when I'm drunk. In fact, I should not be drunk at all.

It does occur to me that I do not like this girl. That her meddling alludes a little too much to my temper, and that the way she looks me directly in my eyes when she speaks to me scares me more than just a little. She says something else that I cannot quite catch because I am focusing rather on the blurry scene that is played out right ahead of me as somebody is looking for his shoes. The shoes I stole just minutes ago and that I have come to realize that I am still wearing. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Her voice is not faint at all, but it takes some time to realize that it is directed at me. Do I hear her? Of course I do. I'm right here. She grabs my upper arm and there is no delicacy in her touch as she tears me away from the fascinating scene that I've been trying to watch. I guess I'm supposed to sit here, right here by the door, since this was where she threw me down. Sit here with these shoes that the guy is looking for. Shut up, stupid.

And I sit here like I guess I was supposed to do and these people come and look at me. They speak to me, but their speech is unintelligible and everything sounds more or less the same. And the guy finds me wearing his shoes and yells and forces the shoes off me, as if I was doing something wrong with them. And you should not write when you're drunk. Sit. Don't write. Ignore them and try not to think of the pen she just took away from you. The pen. The shoes. My notes. Sit. Shit.

The next morning I wake up and feel fine, really. Except for a severe lack of memories. Except for no money left whatsoever. Except for a pain in the right shoulder that I cannot really name. And my new jacket is ruined. But I eat my bacon and eggs before I start feeling dizzy and nauseous and my head starts disassembling itself. From the inside, seemingly.

It is at this point, this particular point in time when the headache first strikes me and my loneliness seems more precarious than ever, that the real occurs to me more clearly than ever. The world as it looks behind the drapery and the boxes that have been set up to cover everything. Set up by us. By ourselves. And the truth I see is the truth about the endless pain and the purposelessness of it all.

Whatever has happened since the beer? The liquor. And the man whom I told that they were looking for me and the woman who called the police when I was genteel and asked that goddamn perpetrator to leave her alone. There is no reward in this sick world of ours for being an honest teller of truths and a fair judge of righteousness and honor, and there is no support for transcending the terrible lies that we are continuously told. Nobody cares. The drapery, the goddamn drapery and everything behind it!1]]> bjorn@hallste.in http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=102 Mon, 10 Oct 2011 21:00:57 +0100 American Patriotism on a Day for Reflection http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=101
And this is the question that has troubled you ever since. The gentle, polite people you meet all over the Fifty States; the honest, truthful Americans that you have known for the better part of your life; the welcoming small-town Americans and the hard-working city dwellers; the great and diverse nation that exists on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. You realized that this was done to all of them - to Americans from sea to shining sea and beyond that, too, who are still today brought to tears when they see the footage of the Twin Towers collapsing or hear George W. Bush saying 'I can hear you' - and you wonder how anyone could do such a thing as this.

And it is easy, if we are to answer this, to fall into arguments about good and evil - to suggest that this was the labour of evil, without recognizing that good and evil are mere structural positions: that they exist only discursively and in relation to one another. Any system of good and evil, this implies, looks just the opposite when seen from the other side. In concrete terms, this means that the liberty that America represents to some is manifested as repression to others and that materially it is possible only because of that repression of others.

This is the critical analysis of those who question power and the use of violence in our world. For many of those whose way of life this violence defends, however, the violence needs no further justification or thought. It may even be invisible or just or taken for granted as the price of freedom, and the military strength of America is taken to indicate her moral superiority and to prove the incomparable efficiency of capitalism and freedom; of unregulated markets (whatever that means) and liberty. But what kind of liberty is this, you think, that presupposes the eradication of others? What kind of society is this, that idolizes violence so long as it occurs abroad?

But while you are critical, you do love America and what she stands for. Not for the violence she extends abroad, but for the peace she keeps within. Not for all those she excludes, but for all those she potentially includes. Not for the violence and eradication of others, but for her willingness to defend your right to question just this. And this, in essence, is the greatness of America. This, more than anything, is what makes America good, and more so than most others. This is the only thing that matters now.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=101 Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:06:07 +0100 Yearning for the Margins: Views from the House on the Hill http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=100

"I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just who I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me." (bell hooks 1990: 146)

This is a bit complicated, for you cannot afford a Mercedes at all. You drive a Skoda. An old one. And your home does not have a motorized gate. In fact, it has no gate at all and the front door is a little hard to lock because it is very old. And this is precisely why it disturbs you so much to see the black Mercedes and the motorized gate: you know the man well, and you know that you could enter the beautiful place that his gate guards any time. You'd only have to knock and he'd let you in.

This has a simple explanation, for while you are not that man in any physical sense, you belong to his world. The world inside the gates, where grass is always green and problems never questions of life and death. This is a world of illusions, yet it is only an illusion that you do not belong to it. You were always on the inside. On the right side - of the walls, the border, the law, the social divide. You're on the inside because your mother gave birth to you there, because your father brought you there, and because his father brought him there. People owe you favors because they owe your father favors, and because you have the raising and the money that your father gave you. Don't forget that you are white.

And you know that this is a privilege that the other people who are walking with you do not have: there is an abrupt sense of difference, for your equality is contextual and if anything should happen you will be different again. This has been proven time and time again: whenever something happened, you called the police. They've towed away other people's cars for you and confronted the man who struck you so you didn't have to. For a time you thought it fun: you used to laugh your evil laugh from your house on the hill. You used to retreat in your coat and your tie to drink martinis and watch the sun rise. You'd retreat and call your friends and have them laugh with you.

But there was a time when, suddenly, you found yourself entangled in something much greater than yourself. You got up on this particular morning, shaved and tied your tie to find that, before you, men in strange, black coats were taking turns talking gibberish. You tell them what happened late some night long ago and they keep talking to each other and smiling, while the man to your right is twisting in agony and looking at a pile of papers in front of him. He is slightly unshaved and nobody seems to notice his pain, because the men keep taking turns talking and citing strange numbers.

And it took time before the men finally concluded, and what they concluded was terrible for the concerned man and of no consequence for you. But it was just, they said. It was what he deserved.

For you, it was of no consequence, but it made you think about how those people you adore - Hunter S. Thompson, John Lennon, Howard Zinn, Henry Thoreau - have all been insiders and well-to-do themselves - famous journalists and musicians, professors, respected writers - but always also on the outside. At odds with the Sheriff and Nixon or Nixon and the FBI or racial separation or tax regulations. Do I have to agree?, you think, and for some reason two lines from an old song come to mind:

Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.
1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Postcolonialism Anthropology and Philosophy Africa and Angola http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=100 Thu, 25 Aug 2011 20:41:57 +0100 Notes on Now http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=99
Let it first be stated, however, that the Norwegian public did respond in a civilized and fascinating manner. Norwegian emergency response teams, authorities and media displayed remarkable and admirable calm and sensibility as the terror and confusion was unfolding: while the haste and efficiency of emergency response was admirable (though, of course, scrutinized and questioned in retrospect), Norwegian royals and politicians of all persuasions communicated the need for communion and love, and Norwegian media reported modestly and without prejudice. Predeterminental references to al-Qaeda and Mullah Krekar and whatnot before Anders Breivik's identity was knows were mostly (if not exclusively) the domain of international media and a few private utterances; early and overdone estimates of causalities were likewise almost nonexistent. Norway, when given a chance to prove our moral and organizational greatness, actually did just that for a while.

I felt proud, therefore, to be a Norwegian as I followed the Twitter- and news-streams on the Friday, and I felt pride in being Norwegian when I saw the great number of flags flown at half mast the following Saturday. When Sunday came and the messages followed from officials and public personas that, sad as the past two days had been, we should not let them alter the things that are good about Norway - the trust, the openness and the freedom - I still felt proud.

But Monday came and I was gradually exposed to the violent aggression and hatred that some people felt towards Breivik and my nationalistic pride was gradually fading away. I saw the Facebook-groups advocating a unique death penalty-ordinance; heard the talk about "Muslims" smiling as they heard about the attacks (which I think reveals more about those who thought they saw smiles than the ones who allegedly smiled); I talked to the people who walked in flower marches in Oslo, but who expressed desires to see Breivik tortured and shot; and I started to hear the murmurs about how the mainstream populist right was responsible for the legitimatization of what Breivik represents.

A feud soon developed in the national media, though one that has been kept fairly low profile until very recently, between those vocal leftists and multiculturalists who explicitly relate Breivik's project to the political discourse of the populist right (Petter Nome), and certain conservatives who argue in return that such intolerance of the utterances of the populist right is in itself a violation of the democracy that the intolerance is intended to defend or strengthen. Structure and agency - both legitimate levels of concern - have been mixed up as those who happen to share some of Breivik's ideas are simultaneously held responsible for his actions: while some Norwegians may agree with and identify with some of Breivik's ideas, nearly every Norwegian would disagree with Breivik's way of making his statement. The obvious morally relevant difference, as far as I can see, must be between killing and not killing rather than between meaning and not meaning something specific. Arguments to the contrary would require a theoretically very sophisticated concept of structure or discourse that I have yet to see in this debate, and that sharing Breivik's stance in any issue becomes morally problematic in itself seems to me rather to be a manifestation of the double oppression of Norwegian society and politics that I have previously described.

But back to that first week after the attacks, as Anders Breivik was due for his first court hearing and a comparably small, yet very vocal group of people showed up do declare him a coward and a racist. Instead of the earlier displays of sorrow and a sense of loss, a lynching mob was developing. Breivik had become an idol of evil to some, and his rights as a human thus seems to have disintegrated to those same people. Never mind that the negation of the humanity of others is exactly what Breivik is accused of. Never mind the calls for not altering all that is good about Norway - including, many people believe, a liberal and efficient law enforcement and juridical system. Never mind that despite the extraordinary brutality of his actions, understanding (though not necessarily agreeing with) Breivik's thoughts and opinions may be just what is needed if we are to avoid future violence.

But parallel to these voices calling for death penalty and swift juridical action and whatnot runs another trend that should seem outright contradictory to it. In the muddle of emotion and opinion that Norway is still entrenched in, some of us find the time and opportunity to compare ourselves, and to compare ourselves very favorably, with post-9/11 America. Prime Minister Stoltenberg's speeches on democracy are proudly compared to those of President Bush on retaliation; our display of sorrow compared to the alleged display of anger in America; our alleged unity favorably compared to the fragmentation of the American society. Never mind that the attacks were vastly different in form and origin; never mind the anger felt in Norway and the sorrow felt in America; never mind that three weeks after, national newspapers still run most of their cover stories on Breivik (... when the world stopped turning); never mind the still developing split between the (populist) right and the (liberal) left, most recently over Carl I. Hagen's utterances on muslims and terrorism. (And by the way, did Petter Nome ever carry one single brick to the bridge most of us are trying to build between Norwegians of all persuasions in the aftermath of 22/7?)

It does not take much effort to understand why the attacks expose certain political differences and make them more acute. Neither does it take much effort to understand most of the reactions that have occurred - sorrow, anger, confusion, even outright hatred: on the contrary, these are all traits of healthy people in a healthy democracy. What I am questioning is rather a reoccurring difference between that which is spoken and that which is done; between theory and practice; between our Norwegian identities and our Norwegian realities. While the last three weeks have exposed a well-functioning state and civil society, they have also exposed a steady need for comparing ourselves to others, at home or abroad - and often on faulty grounds. This is a need - and unhealthy one at that - that the aftermath of the terror should help us abolish and not strengthen.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=99 Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:35:15 +0100 The Intellectual and the Bureaucracy: Nedkvitne and Marie Amelie http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=98
Philosophically, they were laying the ground work for our understanding of how utterances - that is words, written or spoken - can influence rather than simply reflect reality (whatever reality might be). Historically, they were doing this at a time when words did have great significance for lived life as Third World countries were declaring independence, calls for social reforms were getting results elsewhere and when printed media was playing an important role in uncovering truth and shaping public opinion.

In the score of All the President's Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's typewriters sound like machine guns. Typing up their politically influential findings, the two men use words as others use weapons: to change. And the film - as, indeed, the Watergate scandal at large - is a powerful remainder of the importance of the written word as a medium of information and a conveyor of truth. Contemporaneously, radical historian and activist Howard Zinn spent much of his time developing and continuing the American tradition of principled civil disobedience that dates back to Henry David Thoreau's treatise On Civil Disobedience. In classic European history, the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola's J'accuse-article stands out as a particularly famous example of the political and social importance of the written word and, in a colonial setting, similar events have taken place several times since: leading French and British intellectuals, including Sartre and de Beavoir, for example, successfully wrote for the release of Angolan nationalist leader Agostinho Neto from prison in 1957 and in 1962.

And this illuminates another point: the solidarity that has existed between writers, intellectuals and academics internationally and for decades. The intellectual involved in shaping society at large through speaking and writing is also usually part of a network of mutual support from others who are similarly engaged. By devoting him or her self to a search for some pure and pristine truth, for justice, freedom or whatever lofty promise, the intellectual is also often in practice extended support and privileges. Through his or her command of the language of performative utterances and speech acts, the intellectual seems to have been granted the support of the speech and utterances of others.

But how does this work today? In Norway for the past year and a half, the court case between professor emeritus Arnved Nedkvitne and the University of Oslo - Norway's largest and oldest - has brought the theme to public attention. Professor Nedkvitne was discharged from his post over libelous and inflaming e-mails about his institution, superordinates and colleagues, as well as repeated refusals to meet superordinates to explain himself. In the university board and though all instances of court, the harm Nedkvitne's e-mails had done to the milieu at his institute and faculty, together with his display of disregard for his superordinates in not responding to their requests to explain himself, was deemed a sufficient violation for dismissal. While the contents of his e-mails were fronted as the main violation by the university board and the lower instances of court, the Supreme Court regarded his failure to comply with the directions of his superordinates in the university administration as the main issue.

Nedkvitne, however, was supported by a broad selection of Norwegian academics and co-professors questioning the formalization and bureaucratization of the public universities: a university is not a conventional workplace, the argument goes, but a centre for the accumulation and management of knowledge; a professor is not a conventional employee, but an individual trusted to contribute to that purpose. Nedkvitne's e-mails, by this logic, represented legitimate questioning of the way in which the university was run and of the people who were running it. His e-mails, although perhaps unfortunately worded and vested with ill-disposed critique, were rather a symptom of healthy interest in the quality of and conditions for research at the University of Oslo. His failure to meet his superordinates was a principled protest against bureaucratization at the cost of academic freedoms.

When Nedkvitne's discharge was upheld through all instances of court despite chronicles in numerous national newspapers by leading academics like Trond Berg Eriksen, Bernt Hagtvedt and Unni Wikan, it is a symptom of the limited power of language and social pressure in our society. Like the Marie Amelie-case stirred public debate about the possibilities and need for making exceptions from immigration laws earlier this year when the illegal immigrant and author of Ulovlig Norsk (Illegally Norwegian) was arrested and due for deportation, the Nedkvitne-case stirred public debate about juridical protection for academics and intellectuals. Both cases were settled in favor of adherence to bureaucratic procedures: great social pressure, whether popular or elitist, seems to have been ignored in the final decisions - perhaps in itself a sign of the bureaucratization of which Arved Nedkvitne and his colleagues were complaining.

The word, today, seems to have limited power, and thus the power of those who use it is also limited. While this may seem troublesome to some, the decisions thus upheld are not as inhumane as they first might seem: while Marie Amelie's deportation to Russia was followed by her being able to return legally to Norway just weeks after, Nedkvite has been able to sign up as a student and move his research a few hundred meters from the Faculty of Humanities to the University Library for the last few years of his working life. Perhaps the protests are superfluous, after all, when that which is protested against is relatively harmless by historical comparison. In neither case is there a violation of the human rights; there is no Devil's Island and no top-security prison.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=98 Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:49:33 +0100 Rapists or Raped? Strauss-Kahn and Assange http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=97
As I understand the case, there is no doubt that Strauss-Kahn and the hotel maid did have sexual intercourse, but rather a question of whether that sex was consensual. The question, like the question in Julian Assange's ongoing case, is who said what, how and when: did the three women (the hotel maid and Assange's two Swedish admirers) make it explicit that they did not want sex? How about that other woman, Tristane Banon, the French journalist who claims Strauss-Kahn tried to rape her in 2003? Did he? Proof of any statement is hard to obtain in all these cases since consensual and non-consensual sex are, physically, quite similar events and since so much time has already passed. Whatever physical evidence that might have been will have withered - and physical evidence of what? Intentions?

So why keep the cases open, then? Rape is regarded as a particularly cruel act of violence: one that may sometimes do limited physical harm, but that is always uniquely degrading. The crime, if I may, is often spoken of in terms of psychological violence rather than as physical violence, though the act itself is a physical one. The violence is often physical, too, though it is not in the cases of Strauss-Kahn and Assange. Here it is rather the physical act of revealing, touching and abusing the intimate parts of non-conscenting others that is the crime, and the cruelty of that crime is manifested in whatever it is that happens to the psyches of the victims. The hypothetical cruelty.

But the hypothetical cruelty also goes the other way: being deemed guilty of rape is also uniquely degrading. Only particularly cruel men (and women), the logic seems to go, can commit such cruel crimes. The rapist - in public imagery and morality - is one of the lowliest forms of human life and false rape accusations must therefore also be uniquely cruel and immoral. They impose such a burden on other people. It brings the most intimate parts of their lives into the explicit and into the public. It is a betrayal of trust and an abuse of the intimacy that sex can be. It can destroy them and their relations to the people around them if nobody believes that the accusations are false. It probably leaves them confused and sexually insecure, too.

And false accusations are also the ultimate violation of actual rape victims who find their own credibility questioned and who, in return, have to speak of their most intimate and frightful experiences to investigators and in courts. Perhaps to friends and to media. And who find that whatever pain - physical and psychological - they have been through is used by somebody else for easy and unlawful gain: who are thus doubly abused.

False accusations of rape, therefore, are as great acts of cruelty as rapes themselves. Both acts destroy people. Perhaps intentionally so. Regardless of whether his French presidential ambitions can be restored, Strauss-Kahn was forced to resign from the IMF and the case has represented severe public humiliation. Rutting chimpanzee - will the label ever be forgotten? And in a similar manner, the allegations against Assange has given his name and the name of his organization, Wikileaks, new connotations. Who questioned his pure motives before (who, but Pentagon, the White House, ...)?

This, of course, is not to suggest that either of the four women are lying. This is not to accuse any of the four women of anything, and not to justify the New York Post in suggesting that the hotel maid was a prostitute (though they may have been right in suggesting so, like she might be right in suggesting that Strauss-Kahn is a rapist. It brings the most intimate parts of their lives into the explicit and into the public, remember). This, instead, is to remind the public that neither Strauss-Kahn nor Assange have been proven guilty. This is a plea to consider not only the juridical and human rights of the four women, but also those of the two men.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=97 Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:40:28 +0100 The Dialectics of the Self http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=96
We live beyond history and in non-ideological times - a time in the historical trajectory of our civilization when we do not question the fundamentals of our social organization. History ended in 1989 because that year marked "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The ultimate aim in this evolved society is efficiency and our social organization, Fukuyama thus suggested in The End of History? (1989) and we still seem to believe, had reached some theoretical maximum efficiency with the end of the Cold War and significant social reorganization could only make us less effective. There was no longer room for ideology because there is no point in questioning perfection, so we became increasingly introvert. Increasingly interested in everything that had to do with our selves, and the grand projects of ideology and revolution and the overall bettering of mankind fell second in priority to understanding such meta-entities as discourse and our textual selves (that is the reflexive ideal).

But in focusing on everything that was new, we failed, perhaps, to see the majority of things that were not new. Because almost everything has stayed the same. Same shit, different wrapping. Ideology or discourse - what difference does it make? What we still fail to see is that nothing is more ideological than the non-ideology of our times. This is Slavoj Zizek's point, from First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009): "On account of its all-pervasiveness, ideology appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the core of our human identity underneath all the ideological labels."

We are wholly ideological creatures, products of ideology, and I think this is also how we should understand ourselves. As numbered entities in state bureaucracy (in Norway, we all have unique and assigned 11-digit personal numbers); named entities in customer databases; as contributors to the whole that human society is. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene (1976) was an important contribution to the understanding of biological evolution - shifting the unity of study from individual creatures to genes - and I think a similar refocusing of the social sciences is in order - shifting the unit of study from individuals to the ideological structures that engulfs them.

This, though, gets ugly. How can we see our own society from without? By being someone from without - a Sovet-born scholar West of the iron curtain for the first time sometime during the early 1980's. The young man, a man that I have only heard of in my fathers stories, was dining with my father. 'olt, he said, 'olt. I can see that you are a conservative. But in order to be a real conservative, you have to drive a Mercedes. The visitor had walked down Bogstadveien, the Fifth Avenue of Oslo, and come to the conclusion that he capitalist countries were as hollow as his home country. He had seen the finest stores of our country and figured that these were just the decadent facade put up by the state. People didn't shop here - or did they?

Shit. I do. Don't I? Two years ago, I bought a pair of jeans there. Two years ago. Since then, I've been browsing the piles of last seasons' models at half price. And how do I spend my days? Certainly not shopping in glamorous stores. I spend them working. For the state. And when I have time off, I spend it drinking alcohol. I drink alcohol because I feel special when I do it and because I meet people, good people, and because I like the dizziness it brings forth. I meet my family at some restaurant on a Saturday afternoon, and we spend our salaries on good food and good wine and we go home and drink more wine and some coffee, and call some friends who come over and drink more wine with us. It gets late - it always does. And sometime during the night when my parents are gone and I sit with my sister and some friends we call somebody who has not been drinking that night and get them to drive us to buy junk food because it tastes good and because we feel as if we are cheating death by eating food that the state has classified as unhealthy. We feel rebellious and we feel special when we do it, even though we are queueing for over forty minutes to get our food because a hundred other people are doing the same thing at the same time as we are doing it. Cheating death. While we queue, we take out our iPhones, which we bought because the people of Apple Corp. are good at making us feel unique when we buy their products, but find that everybody else in the queue have iPhones. We play Angry Birds, like everybody else.

And when we get the junk food, we eat it outside in the sunrise before we drive to some after-party somewhere else. The guy with the car is getting impatient because we promised to pay him and we haven't yet, so we stop to fill gas for him. But I do not pay for the gas right there - I use my MasterCard and pay the bill instead when I get my paycheck because at that moment I am broke. But once a month I get a paycheck from the state to pay for whatever it is that I need to pay for in order to be content with working for the state. My rent and food, the fuel, the alcohol. It is as if I hear the slogan from by boss' coffee mug:

Wake up. Drink coffee. Work for the state.

And what do we do while working for the state? We keep the state going, mainly for the purpose of keeping the state going. The argument is tautological or circular or it assumes what it sets out to prove or whatever: everything, including the state, is legitimized as being in the interest of an efficient bureaucracy and an efficient state. Whatever I get, whatever pleases me, I get simply to be a content citizen acting in whatever way the state wants me to. The imported coffee that I drink (Ethiopian, Brazilian, organic, fair-trade), the tailored shirts that cost two days' wages, the elegant electronics I command, the website I designed, it all works to make me feel special, feel as if I am realizing some grand potential that I have. It gives the illusion of the transcendence that being with my friends or family or girlfriend otherwise does, but it never gets equally satisfying. This, I think, is because it is in personal relations that we are created as persons: that we do, indeed, transcend the ugly instrumentality of the ideological state and discursive sociality. In The Gender of the Gift (1988), Marilyn Strathern writes that "a dividual androgyne is rendered an individual in relation to a counterpart individual." The argument is long and complicated and messy, but her point is that we are constructed (though she does perhaps not use that term herself) as gendered beings only in relation to other gendered beings (who, in turn, are constructed in relation to us). And this, I believe, is true not only of gender, but also of all other personal properties: they are created in our encounters with other people, as the synthesis of dialectical relations between Self and Other.

This dialectical creation of our selves is a process that lets us transcend the bureaucracy and structures and formalism of the state; it is ongoing in every context that can be thought of as social, and perhaps most of all in the microcosm of the home: the home that is repeated thousands of times through the cities and suburbs, but where each man is a husband, a father and somebody's son; each woman a wife, a mother and a daughter. Dialectics are powerful stuff, and being a son or a father or a brother or a husband are more than roles in Goffman and Bruner's dramaturgical manners - these are also essences of our persons, what we are beyond mere workers in an ideological state. The dialectical process itself is anti-ideological in creating social entities and spaces beyond the ideological scope of the state, but it is only partially ideologically determined - this is the same process in communist states as it is in capitalist ones as it would probably also be in non-statal societies. We feel good in relation to some people, and we give some of these relations (and thus the properties they instill in us) tremendous importance when we spend much time tending to them.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Anthropology and Philosophy http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=96 Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:12:47 +0100 I Can Still Make Cheyenne: The America Diaries Revisited http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=95
That feeling has stuck with me, and I can still recall the particular stretch of asphalt as it looked through my windshield, the semi-arid surroundings, the mountains to my left and the image I had in my head of George Strait's truck leaving the pay-phone: He aimed his truck towards that Wyoming line, with a little luck he could still get there in time ... I see, when I close my eyes, the the tall hood; the chromed bumper; the great square grille, the crudeness, beauty and batteredness of a late 1980's Ford pickup. In particular, I see the slight contours molded into the great steel hood covering the V8 - the slightly raised profile running all the way down the middle as if it was indeed designed for the driver to aim along, and the paint that has been worn by the sun. Faded red, I am almost certain. Two-tone, of course.

And I hear not only steel guitars and fiddles - though I hear that too - but also the V8 as it starts, and the roar it makes as the truck is put into gear and the accelerator is depressed and the rear wheels slip just a little off the gravel. Because the force from the big block is too great for worn tires and unpaved roads, the rear of the truck pulls slightly to the right before the beast picks up sufficient momentum to remain stable. The truck speeds along, enters the Interstate and disappears slowly into the not-yet-cold desert night. Along the interstate, aimed for Wyoming.

More than anything, the scene is melancholic. 'I Can Still Make Cheyenne' is a tale of a man losing his girl; it is about being lonesome and alone; of dreaming of a love and a home that, in reality, does not exist. It is melancholic, yet fascinating and intriguing, and I think that this fondness of whatever it is that 'I Can Still Make Cheyenne' expresses, and the way in which it figures so centrally in my memories of three months in the West, begets the question of what I was doing in America. Why is it that I should, if I may use the term loosely, identify with such a tale? Did America take anything of value away from me? No, not really. Was I running away from something? No, at least not on any conscious level. Rather, I think, I was treating a restlessness - a curiosity - and I found in the West what I wanted to find instead of what I thought I would find.

I have already written of the Interstate as a dream of loneliness; Baudrillard, as I read his America (1986), has already written of the European in America as finding the fictions he has grown up with: the desert landscapes - arches and towers, the endless quarreling of the squirrels, the coyotes and roadrunners, the thunder in the mountains yonder. And there is more - the old pickups, cowboys and herds; the gigantic Stars and Stripes; the endless patriotism. Remember WTC - Forget WMD. God Bless America. In the neo-liberal age, after 9/11, after the election of the first non-white president, in the midst of a financial crisis, when oil was $100 a barrel, the America I found was still genuinely American.

And America, the land of the free and of crude capitalism is a place where you realize that freedom has a cost. That doing what you dreamt of has a cost. I grew up dreaming of being a cowboy and loving the cowboy ways ... I learned all the rules of a modern day drifter: don't you hold on to nothing too long. It is this cost that George Strait is formulating, too: that freedom means disentanglement and that it means loneliness. George Strait is not the first or only one to formulate this (and it is even more explicit in 'Amarillo by Morning' than in '... Cheyenne') - Willie Nelson has done it; Jack Kerouac did; the great 1980's and 1990's genre of road movies did - but it was his song, the coincidence that I first heard it as I was, indeed, headed for Cheyenne myself, and my own brief life on the road that made me realize how it applied to me as well. The reality of my own life and choices - the fact that I actually can and have to chose what I want to do and who I want to be - occured to me in a way that it had never done before. If we travel, as some people say, most of all to get to know ourselves, it is the day that I heard 'I Can Still Make Cheyenne' that truly defines my American roadtrip.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Places (Stories of) http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=95 Sun, 15 May 2011 13:06:19 +0100 50 Years of Manned Space Flights http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=94 space age and the first image of Earth from space: Earthrise. American astronauts photographed Earth from space in 1968, over seven years after the Soviet Union completed the first manned space flight, and I think it is right on this day, the fiftieth anniversary of that first first manned flight, to look back at the politics that shaped the space missions. The story I tell is of America, but it is of a more fumbling and less secure America than we have seen since.

Space missions have a tendency to capture our imaginations as demonstrations of the grandeur of civilized society and the realization of our highest ideals. Science. Diplomacy. Cooperation. Unity. We came in peace for all mankind. It is as if the fascination for the technology - the precision and the raw force - compels us to forget all about critical thought and to accept the propaganda that ensues. We forget about politics. And while it would be wrong not to admire the great feats of engineering that spaceflight represents, it is also wrong not to consider the political climate under which it progressed. The claim that the Cold War provided a significant proportion of the incentive to explore space is uncontroversial, but I think it is also a claim that is not made often enough. It was when Yuri Gagarin landed Vostok-1, the first successful manned mission to space, or rather as a direct but somewhat late response to this, that President Kennedy in September 1962 announced his intention of sending living humans to the moon at Rice University:

But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240 000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than three hundred feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25 000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun - almost as hot as it is here today - and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out - then we must be bold.

There is, however, not a word of Gagarin and only one mention of the Soviet Union throughout this landmark speech:

Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were made in the United States of America and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.

And these are strong words from the leader of a nation that just over a year earlier had found itself beaten in the race to send men into space, and that five years earlier had responded to the successful Sputnik-launch of 1957 with the Vanguard rocket that produced a great ball of fire without ever lifting off the ground. In the UN, the United States was offered aid from the Soviet fund for underdeveloped countries. What Kennedy was doing was defining a new measure of success that would lead public imagination away from earlier failures and into a new future where the United States could succeed, yet a measure that was similar enough to erase the great Soviet accomplishments once reached. Mentioning the Soviet successes would only actualize them and bring them on into history - not mentioning them would make them irrelevant or mere historical parentheses and footnotes to the great American achievement to come. Kennedy, it seems, had thought through this.

What followed is history, but today's anniversary gives us time to think also of what preceded the speech at Rice: a time, though perhaps a short one, when the Soviet Union surely seemed to be ahead of and better than the United States. This looks a bit strange in retrospect, but while history unfolds one can never know how anything will end: the great victories of the United States in 1969 and 1989 were not yet real, but the losses of 1957 and 1961 certainly were. The sentiment of American inadequacy was well captured, I think, by Mennen Williams, the Democratic governor of Michigan, whose words need no further comment:

Oh little Sputnik, flying high
With made-in-Moscow beep,
You tell the world it's a Commie sky
and Uncle Sam's asleep

1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Current Affairs http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=94 Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:44:11 +0100 Future in the Postcolony http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=93

…
Liberty in our eyes
the sound in our ears
of avid hands upon the skin of the drum
in the accelerated and clear rhythm
from the congos Kalahari mountain light
infinite red bonfires our violated fields
spiritual harmony of the tam-tam voices
in the clear rhythm of Africa

Thus

The way of the stars
along the agile curve of the gazelles' throat
for the harmony of the world.

'Western Civilization' was penned by Agostinho Neto, later to assume horn-rimmed glasses and become the 'poet-president' of an independent Angola in decay. The poem was translated by an A. Segal and published in Africa Today, the July/August 1970 issue. By this time, political anti-colonial movements were well established in Angola and in the suburban musseques of Luanda, new cultural forms were challenging colonial order and mindsets. Most of all, the music of the very late colonial era is often conceptualized as a representation of popular thought - and certainly more so than the highbrow and political scribbles of Neto and those like him: the more internacionalista elite. But leave all that aside, the social classes and their differences, and think rather of the promises.

There was a physical war - it is true, but it came only later - and there was a metaphysical war: a cultural war if you like, about who was who and who was not. About the Portuguese and the First- and the Second- and the Third World. The UNITA, the FNLA, and the MPLA. Savimbi, Holden, Neto. Outcast whites, mestiços, unemployed assimilados. This was a war of definitions - of Gramscian hegemony - of whose and what Angola would be.

And in this space of multiple ideologies and promises, space of decreasing control and increasing oppression, people were writing poems and songs and performing at night in the illicit clubs of the musseques and being harassed by the police. The colonial police and the postcolonial police, when that came. People were invited or asked to do this or that, refused to conform, and disappeared. David Zé. Urbano de Castro. Artur Nunes. Trotsky was killed with an ice axe, though that was long before and in Mexico.

But this was rather afterwards: after the promises and the hopes. The celebration and the ideology. After - even - the parades and the great speeches. November eleventh. The ancestral lands - the lands where the bao-babs of the ancestors and the homesteads that are once again African property are scattered - were free now. Free from the shackles of colonialism and the injustice and racist hatred under which they have suffered for generations. Free. Theirs. Ours.

This, on the other hand, was all before the houses in old-town were falling down. Citade baixa. Before, even, they were scarred by a general lack of care. Before the pharmacy was out of drugs. Before the wear, the emptiness and the hunger. The headache, which was overwhelming because food was unavailable for days. The sun, the shade from the bao-babs, and the bad wine.

There was, perhaps, a short moment of bliss when one could sit in the parks and enjoy the beauty of it, and even share that beauty. Independência total. Libertação. A conceptual beauty, really, but one that was real only for a short while: until the rush of the bad wine turned against us. As this was unfolding, life in the musseques was still lived by the rhythm of Os Kiezos, but less and less according to the rhythm of the revolution; life was still in a decisively postcolonial phase, but further and further away from an ideological one. The promises were fading away, being replaced rather by cynicism. The bright future, it must have dawned upon someone, is perhaps best whilst it is still future.1]]> bjorn@hallste.in Postcolonialism Africa and Angola http://www.hallste.in/index.php?entryid=93 Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:50:49 +0100