Softened milk arrowroots with Grandma

Dr Worreddy and Grandma

One of the motivations for moving to southern Tasmania in 2004 was to be closer to Bruny Island. Colin Johnson's (Mudrooroo's) 1983 novel, Doctor Worreddy's Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, set largely on Bruny Island, seemed to have exerted a magnetic pull on me, providing an imagined history that I felt I could connect with. 

This pull, towards the Bruny Island of this historical fiction, I now realise, was due to unresolved questions in that part of my heritage occupied by my paternal grandmother. While my paternal grandfather was born in the South West of England, eventually migrating to New South Wales just prior to WWII, my maternal grandmother descended from English convicts, and her de facto husband and father of my mother held a Scottish heritage, occupying a spectral presence in my life due to his disappearance as he succumbed to alcoholism after service in WWII, Grandma's heritage was and is hazy.

She was adopted and hailed from somewhere near Grenfell, in western New South Wales, moving to Narraweena, opposite a Church of England, on the northern beaches of Sydney's north shore after WWII where my father, uncle and aunty were raised. When Dad and Mum raised us three kids we lived 5 minutes away from Grandma and Grandfather and, working hard to start their new family, my parents would entrust me to Grandma and I remember spending days with her as a young boy. While she was needy, troubled and bitter, I was still being spoilt, as the first grandchild often is, feeling warm and doted on.  

Then, Dad and Grandma had a falling out--they'd had a tense relationship, full of contests and struggles--when I was about 7 and that was the end of that. No more milk arrowroots dipped in milky, sugary tea. No more Sunday School. 

As kids we tend to experience time as an opening out, wide and expansive. Summers feel like years, days can last for a season. But in my memory Grandma died not long after this falling out. Maybe it was a couple of years later. I'm not sure. 

We never spoke of her again. It seemed like a relief that she had passed away--she was never satisfied with her children's achievements, and was disappointed with life. Nothing was good enough . . .

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A shameful heritage?

Talk that Grandma was probably adopted because she had an aboriginal mother was slow to emerge in my extended family. A cousin begun to tick the Aboriginal box on forms from which her children stood to gain some advantage, and my Aunty and her kids and even my brother's features and darker skin colour started to register as noticeably aboriginal. Searches for proof failed to locate definitive evidence. We'd left it too long; anyone who might have known what led to her adoption was dead. Maybe there are diaries or journals that provide some confirmation of what we believe. As far as we know she wasn't  part of the 'stolen generation': something less institutional had probably occurred, and a moral and shameful problem had been dealt with in a benevolent fashion at a private and confidential level. The problem solved by adoption.

Maybe her bitterness was in discovering her adoption. And where did all that shame go? Did she carry it into her life? Did it inform her affective world in such a profound way that there would never be any relief from its atmospheric pressure; no overcoming a social and historical structure of feeling through protestant denial and the drive to work-based social ascension for your children. 

What was the intergenerational heritage of these structures of shameful feeling? What cultural forms arose and were deployed to try and personally assuage and overcome historical shame? 

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3 criteria

Questions of Aboriginal identity and heritage remain highly contested in contemporary Australia. Certain jobs, university and school places and scholarships are earmarked for Aboriginal applicants. Applying for these places or funds necessitates confirmation of identity, which can be sought by satisfying three criteria: proof of descent, self-identification and recognition by the local Aboriginal community organisation. In some cases, this third step is not a requirement. 

Identity

For some Aboriginals, claims to membership by those with white skin is illegitimate: how can you be Aboriginal if you haven't grown up with the experience of being marked as Aboriginal? There is an assumption here, which is that the fairer skinned person hasn't been identified as Aboriginal. Someone raised in an identified Aboriginal family will be marked as Aboriginal, and may also have been inducted into the Aboriginal cultural, social, political, legal and religious systems and practices of their country and people.  

Clearly, I can't claim Aboriginal identity. How could I? 

Need

To be Aboriginal in Australia is, for some people, to be in a state of crisis; in dire need. To be fair-skinned, metropolitan, and university educated is utterly incompatible with being Aboriginal because real Aboriginals require support and those who are dark-skinned, regional and poorly educated should not have to suffer while the relatively privileged receive the advantages and benefits intended for those in need. This is a powerful argument; one that can be turned towards an attack on fair-skinned Aborginals and thereby on any Aboriginals who are not deemed to be in need. 

Commentators like Andrew Bolt have exemplified this sort of attack, effectively arguing that skin-colour equates with privilege (either its lack or surplus), ignoring the degree to which an individual's life experiences cannot necessarily be read off their skin colour. The goal of attacks like Bolt, it seems to me, is to de-historicise the complex affects of colonisation, re-inscribing the meaning of Aboriginality onto the dark skin of Aboriginals now. Here the Aboriginal is pre-modern, in need of intervention, close to extinction. 

Heritage

For some people, ticking the box for Aboriginal identification on a form, is less about their painful experiences of being interpellated or recognised as Aboriginal, and less about a neo-liberal bid to exploit that section of their portfolio of human capital lying like old blue chip stocks in their genetic heritage, than it is about a question or pressure in their sense of heritage. There is no profound unsettling of identity or dire need. 

That part of my heritage occupied by my Grandma lies off the map. There is no actual country she came from, only ones that are imagined, like Dr Worreddy's on Bruny Island. This is not to say there is no heritage or legacy: an atmosphere of personally lived historical shame and learning how to time the dunking of milk arrowroot biscuits without oversoftening them.

PS These thoughts partly inspired by SBS TV's Insight program from this week: Aboriginal or Not. 

Historical presents: gearings and momentum

At work yesterday x was telling me about a workshop on flourishing she attended. X drew a pie chart, divided into 3 sections: 40, 50 & 10%. 'One slice is for genetic factors, another is your own efforts and the other is for situation and environmental influences. What percentage influence does each have on happiness and flourishing?' I asked about the validity of the science she claimed was behind this diagram and asked 'Where's the slice for history?' 'The science is there and history is the same as sociology which is covered under the situation area.'

I went for 40% genetic, 50% situation and 10% will.

Wrong! Will is 50, genes are 10 and situational factors are 40%.

The phone then rang and the chat ended but I was left wondering how do you explain what you mean by the pressure of history on the present?

The historical present is a central focus of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism which positions itself against the types of postive psychology or science of flourishing that seem to me so easily play into neoliberal governmentalities of optimistic self-enterprising. But the historical present: how to grasp the idea of it? Gears perhaps?

Gears of varying weights and locations, speeds and interconnections that can turn as slowly as Pluto's revolution around the sun, or as fast as an orbiting electron. Gears all turning, some slowing, some newly envigorated, some as local as your own bloodstream's rhythms and some as distant as the invention of the alphabet.

The historical present is a meshwork of gearings, driving a mess of phenomena. Some gears carry such weight that although they are no longer impelled, the cultural and material affects of their turning still resounds. Slowly moving towards stasis, gears like the vinyl record run only on momentum. Other gears are emergent, shrouded in the public imaginary through the lens of moral panics or the death of civic discourse, like web based social media.

The structures of feeling that are historically present are like this meshwork of gears that require something like a rhythmanalysis to grasp. The historical present weighs like pressure systems on situations and conscious intentional will.

For new structures of rhythmic feeling

Instead of the vision of the everyday organised by capitalism that we find in Lefebvre and de Certeau, among others, I am interested in the overwhelming ordinary that is disorganised by it, and by many other forces besides. This is a matter of a different emphasis, not of a theoretical negation: the rhythms of ordinary existence in the present--Lefebvres's dressage as a model for subjectivity in general--scramble the distinction between forced adaptation, pleasurable variation, and threatening dissolution of of life-confirming norms. This ordinary is an intersecting space where many forces and histories circulate and become "ready to hand" in the ordinary, as Stanley Cavell would put it, for inventing new rhythms for living, rhythms that could, at any time, congeal into new norms, forms, and institutions.

Lauren Berlant Cruel Optimism Location 128/4461

Human Capital: abilities machines producing income streams

A great passage from Jodi Dean's essay

Neoliberalism is [. . .] a governmentality wherein economic reason confronts, judges, and displaces governmental reason. Foucault’s primary examples are Germany and the United States. In each instance neoliberalism arises out of a critique of excessive governance (2008: 322), as a response to a mode of government that is erring on the side of too much and hence endangering freedom. The interesting twist is that where one would expect such a critique to urge the state to take its hands off the economy, it does something else instead: it subjects the state to the economy. German and American neoliberals reverse the equation, making the economy the legitimator of the state. ‘In other words: a state under the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state’ (2008: 116).

This reversal intensifies and extends biopolitical processes and mechanisms. Insofar as neoliberalism emphasizes the market as a site of competition rather than exchange, it demands that the state combat anti- com-petitive mechanisms and work to spread opportunities for competi- tion. Consequently, the state must be ever vigilant in these efforts as well as vigilant about its own efficiency in so doing. Such vigilance, moreover, is exercised not just with regard to government, as its operations and resources are privatized. Rather, neoliberalism entails a governmentality of ‘active, multiple, vigilant, and omnipresent’ intervention in society (2008:160). Society, too, must be opened up and subjected to the dynamic of competition. For neoliberals, this takes the form of the enterprise society, a vital, differentiated society of productive entrepreneurs, that is, individuals who take responsibility for their own success and well-being (hence, Foucault emphasizes their role as producers rather than consumers).

American neoliberalism was particularly effective in extending biopolitics via its theory of human capital. Human capital was the concept through which neoliberals grasped labor in its specificity, the way they sought to understand the meaning of labor means for the working person, the ra- tionality underlying the worker’s choices. Treating income as a return on capital, neoliberals construed the worker’s income in terms of the capital he has in himself. Because of the multiplicity of factors influencing workers’ choices – mobility, quality of life, familiarity, capacities to adapt, aver- sion to risk – the theory of human capital enabled economic analysis to permeate a variety of new domains, domains previously the purview of the human sciences that developed around disciplinary institutions (soci- ology, psychology, demography, criminology, etc).

Foucault explains that there are two primary kinds of human capital, innate and acquired. Innate elements are heritable, genetic. A person concerned with her child’s innate human capital can take the proper steps toward finding an appropriate co-producer of this child. She can seek to secure a mate with desirable traits that might reduce her off-springs’ risks and enhance their competitive position. Genetic research is thus valuable to individuals in an enterprise society as it provides a knowledge they can use to plan for the future. At the same time, it gives rise to a complex of issues of screening, disclosure, prevention, and risk. Acquired capital refers to the skills and capacities that prepare individuals for competition. Health care, both infant and maternal, is important here, as are matters of health and hygiene, diet and exercise, relationships and opportunities. In this regard, the theory of human capital stimulates interventions in family life as it asks about the best ways to produce economic competitors. Neoliberalism’s emphasis on education as preparation for work similarly targets the worker as an ‘abilities machine.’ Rather than producing critical humanists or responsible citizens, the theory of human capital treats education as a means for instilling in the worker those specific capacities that render him sufficiently competent, competitive, and flexible.

Under neoliberalism, then, power gets a hold of individuals to the extent that they are little enterprises, abilities machines competing in the market.