Re: [-empyre-] being alive now?

[The Paul Annears <the.paul.annears@gmail.com>]

There are several points that Ms Brennan makes in her posting that I
find of interest.  Rather than deal with these points individually I
will simply say that it appears to me that she is thinking for
herself...which is a good thing.  There is not a lot of it around.

It is absolutely necessary, for any one who wants to begin to
understand what is really going on, to see the self-obsessive
Christian time-scale as an illusion and middle-class 'values' as the
most vicious of jokes in poor taste.

Picture an orange on a string hanging from the old rotary washing line
in the back yard.  This is the earth and its context.  In the right
circumstances the orange will grow a mould which will rapidly cover
and consume the surface of the orange, produce spores, then die. 
Regardless of the heroically irrelevant efforts of Mr Bush to bring
democracyâ to the be-nighted peoples of 'our' planet, what we are
witnessing in our life-times (plural) is the rapacious growth of the
mould of greedy middle-class humanity.

Any discussion that shares the normal assumptions of the
middle-classes is likewise doomed.  The middle-classes are the people
who run the unavoidably fascistic bureaucracy (and the gulags given
the chance), the people who feed off the poor, the people who consume
excessively at the cost of their internal and external environments
(not that there is a difference), in a word they are the living dead.

There are so many assumptions.  Everything must be questioned. 
Reification is the least of it.  There can be no doubt that we are
living in the end-time.

Isn't language wonderful.

A Paul Annear



On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 10:32:33 +1300, Stella Brennan <stevid@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> [not]
> 
> >  shutting up and being prepared to listen
> 
> hmm, my feminist spine tingles when i think of being seen and not
> heard... but this again is a point of tension - western style feminism
> vs many other kinds.
> 
> > I recognise Stella's sense of
> > "place" that is integral to being "home". It is an affective response,
> > not a
> > critical one.
> 
> well, isn't that ole mind-body dichotomy a famed relic of western
> scientism?
> 
> vis:
> 
> > false oppositions and tensions are primarily a construction of
> > European ideology
> 
> > [the
> > classic settler response to indigenous issues is to use history to try
> > and
> > think *before* the time of indigenous people, in order to destablilise
> > this
> > threatening sense of proprietorship indigeneity symbolises, thus myths
> > about
> > the Moriori being a "previous indigenous culture" colonised by Maori,
> > so hey
> > we're just continuing the process, what's the problem here!]
> 
> ummm, gee danny, do you really think i'm that retro?  maybe it's my
> fault for leaving my main topic till last...
> 
> >> what i was really wanting to talk about is the intersection of
> >> place and technology in the discourse of environmental restoration
> 
> when i'm talking about recent inhabitance i'm really talking
> geological, rather than anthropological time.  most accounts say that
> maori arrived here a thousand years ago.  that's a really long time,
> but when i think about aboriginal people's being in australia 40
> thousand years, i recognise that there's been more  possibility for
> co-evolution - i guess i'm thinking of things like firestick farming.
> I'm also thinking about how our experiences of the land differ from
> europe where agriculture and human impacts have been shaping the
> continent since before the ice age.
> 
> I recognise that this too partakes of a scientific discourse, but I
> find the idea of a land without people really fascinating, and yes,
> politically loaded.  i think about it a lot because i am involved in
> habitat restoration around the areas of the city where i have lived -
> planting, clearing of invasive weeds.  doing this in a way that
> encourages native species requires access to research (carried out by
> groups such as the department of conservation and auckland regional
> authority).  it also gives me a way of learning about maori uses and
> knowledge of plants, a learning that i don't think is expropriation. by
> naming my mountain (latterly maungawhau, now rangitoto) i was
> attempting to describe myself as an  urbanised aucklander, with not
> that much access to marae culture.  for me this ecological activity,
> which is  highly mediated and technological in many aspects, gives me a
> way of trying to understand both indigenous ideas about the land, and
> the land itself, which came before people, and will exist long after.
> best
> stella
> 
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 1/22/05 12:08 AM, "Stella Brennan" <stevid@xtra.co.nz> wrote:
> >
> >> it sometimes seems a double bind - damned as a cultureless settler if
> >> you make reference to tangata whenua, hegemonic know-nothing if you
> >> don't.
> >>
> >> as has been pointed out, speaking position is never simple.  I
> >> remember
> >> at last year's cultural provocation conference listening to Dean
> >> Hapeta
> >> make some pretty violent and sexist comments, to which i would have
> >> liked to respond, but being struck dumb by the context (and probably
> >> also the fact that he's a great deal more verbally dextrous than me).
> >> and danny, pakeha from queensland (is that an ok description danny?),
> >> is the person on ada who is usually most articulate about
> >> appropriations and misrepresents of indigenous culture.
> >>
> >> as a way of trying to describe a pakeha identity  i wanted to talk
> >> about place.   aotearoa/new zealand was pretty much the last major
> >> landmass to be inhabited by humans, and as such, it is possible to
> >> reconstruct an image of a landscape before it was  framed by culture.
> >> of course, that notion in itself - a pre-lapsarian, moa and giant
> >> eagle
> >> strewn gondwanaland, is an interesting construction.  there's  a lot
> >> of
> >> nationalist baggage goes along with representation of our (one hundred
> >> per cent pure) natural environment, and with flora and fauna subject
> >> to
> >> treaty claims, and the foreshore and seabed issue, Maori and Pakeha
> >> uses and meanings for the land cut across each other.
> >>
> >> but,but,but,but...
> >>
> >> maybe it sounds cheezy and off-topic, but the thing that gets me going
> >> every time i step out of the terminal at auckland airport is the smell
> >> of moss in the air, and the things that i pine for when i'm away
> >> (articulating my position as a subject of global capital, or
> >> whatever...) is the crazy crinkly shores of Aucklands' harbours and
> >> the
> >> locating cone of Rangitoto in the background.   and the fact that this
> >> is my home, that i'm not really happy anywhere else, is one of the
> >> things that makes the net appealing - that possibility of staying
> >> where
> >> you are while being somewhere else.
> >>
> >>
> >> hmm. maybe tomorrow....
> >> best
> >> stella
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> empyre forum
> >> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> >> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> 


-- 
The Paul Annears
www.xxos.net