A strange appearance

What does it mean to call something strange? Or as ecological philosopher Timothy Morton (2016) frames it: how can anything not seem strange in a world that has been fundamentally altered at its core by the visible and invisible layers of human histories and human impact. If what we see is mere appearance and what is, is only partly apparent, then everything is very strange even when it doesn’t appear to be.

Our world has been queered. Has in fact always been queer.

For Morton, the strange, the queer, the weird, present a kind of logic that balances knowing and not knowing, a new way of thinking that is fitting for this world we find ourselves in. 

In two recent bodies of work I explore what Morton calls the “strange strangeness” of perception in the age of the Anthropocene. The layered, saturated imagery of this work evokes a sense of the ‘dark-uncanny’ which Morton postulates is a phase of ‘dark ecology’ as we pass from ‘dark-depressed’ to a ‘dark-sweet’ more hopeful perspective. 

A strange appearance – variations, a series of 25 variations of one image exhibited with fellow Baldessin Studio printmakers in, In the Space of Elsewhere, is part of my ongoing engagement with abstracted variations on landscape and still life traditions. In playing with these forms I seek to investigate our troublesome representation of ‘nature’: all at once beautiful, monstrous and mysterious. 

Designed to evoke a sense of both outer and inner space, these images begin with close-focused photography of foliage, flowers and other elements of urban gardens. They are built up through digitally layering multiple images over painted textures from abstract cold wax paintings which in turn have been the result of obsessive layering. This play with digital and painterly aesthetics, and with the recomposed image, have been a continuous part of my practice. The process of construction and deconstruction inherent in this approach to image makes explicit the persistent trace of the human hand in the ‘natural’ in our precarious times.

A strange appearance – variations takes one photogravure key plate developed through these techniques and then underlays a selection of different pigment prints to create variants which change in colour and form as the two layers intersect. This play with multiple variations speaks to both possibility and mutation: the open and the determined aspects of change.

The second body of work, These two shapes together clinging, presented as part of the Midsuma exhibition Emerge O ut, also shows variations of an image: three variations of a triptych taken through different print processes.  

The title references David Hockney’s seminal 1961 painting ‘We Two Boys Together, Clinging,’ a title he took from a Walt Whitman poem. Hockney’s early work was a brave public statement of queer desire at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the UK. The underlying digital image in my piece takes a screen shot from gay porn and abstracts it through various digital processes, parts of the original imagery are still recognisable other elements merely maintain the register of the body. The queer body today still moves in and out of visibility.

The work combines various manual and digital print processes. The first version was exhibited last year as part of a group show of mokulito (wood lithography) work. Since then I have continued to experiment with this imagery through multiple print processes. In the original version the ‘key plate’ pigment print is overlayed by a coupling of biomorphic mokulito shapes. In the second version the original digital key plates have become photogravure plates and are overlayed onto colour pigment prints. In a third version the multiple levels of layering is done digitally and produced as a pigment print. In each version different elements of the underlying imagery are highlighted or hidden.

Shape and layer are both fundamental to the vocabulary of any image. But more than just structuring balance and depth, I take them to also be ways of knowing that connect us with bodies and histories and the strangeness of our times.

Layers reveal and conceal. The strange appearance of the Anthropocene is revealed/hidden in layers. When scientists want to confirm the emergence of a new geological era they look to evidence in the layered histories of ice cores drilled in Antarctica, or the the layers of sediment built up at the bottom of lakes. They can, for example, detect the sudden appearance of new elements such as plutonium that has fallen from the air and settled as a layer marking the beginning of the human made atomic era; or the sudden emergence in these cores of a human processed metal like aluminium.

While highlighting layers links to a type of archeological thinking, highlighting a sense of shape builds connections between our bodily shapes and the shapes around us, particularly the raw vegetal shapes of plant life. These vegetal or biomorphic shapes are both crafted and emergent in these two groups of prints. Jane Bennett suggests that this ‘mode of communication that proceeds via shape’ connects us to not only new ways of seeing but also new ways of being. Once attuned to these affiliative sensory connections “you become alert to them, and then there’s a slight but real kaleidoscopic shift in everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and think. What becomes a little more sensible, conceivable, and plausible is the existence of a web of cross-body, shapely communications that subvents or is only vaguely hooked into more word-reliant networks. One may start to experience oneself less as an intersubjective being and more as an inter- and intra- twined shape.” (Bennett 2017: 103) 

Bennett, J., 2017. ‘Vegetal life and onto-sympathy’ in Keller, C. and Rubenstein, M.J. eds., Entangled worlds: Religion, science, and new materialisms. Fordham Univ Press. pp.89-110.

Morton, T., 2016. Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. Columbia University Press.

In the Space of Elswehere, Marcus O’Donnell, Sophia Szilagyi, Angela Coombs Matthews, Sorcha Mackenzie & Silvi Glattauer, Sol Gallery Fitzroy, 7-18 February 

Emerge O ut, Brunswick Street Gallery, 27 January – 11 February

Marcus O’Donnell February 2024

The shape of things

‘My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing’ 2023, Mokulito and ink on Somerset Satin, unique state, series of two, 76 x 112 cm

The following is an artist statment from my latest exhibition on at Red Gallery, Melbourne, 28 November – 10 December

What water leaves: the shape of things

I was drawn to mokulito to investigate a type of expressive mark-making that I could not as easily explore in my photo-based and digital printmaking. So, this work is, at a simple level, about gesture, juxtaposition and shape, but for me this also means it is inevitably about bodies, landscapes and the sometimes-uncanny resonance when all these elements sit together on a page.

My earlier exhibitions were concerned with either the recomposed body – playing on old master images – or the colour field of abstract photography. More recently my work has begun to explore what philosopher Timothy Morton calls ‘dark ecology,’ through the construction of abstracted digital landscapes. Each of these bodies of work in their own way was trying to find a way of negotiating the language of abstraction in a digital and post-digital era. There is a resonance of each of these ideas in this new work, a connection that has been made explicit in the pieces that combine digital prints and mokulito. 

The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that painting is ‘autofigurative’ (1933/1993: 141) by which he seems to mean that even in the most realist traditions, the figure has a life of its own, it emerges from a confusion of line and tone and mark. Painting he says, “break[s] ‘the skin of things’ to show how the things become things and how world becomes world.”

As I explored the practice of mark-making, playing with the experimental and accidental happenstance of mokulito, I became increasingly interested in this process of breaking the skin of things, of what might emerge in the process of spilling ink onto board and layering it as printed marks on the page. The process itself is mesmerising because the marks emerge in different ways at different parts of the process, seeming to make real that ‘autofigurative’ emergence of the image. As the tusche – a special waxy lithographic ink – settles on the board and evaporates it ‘reticulates’ or forms patterns and as these patterns are inked and printed, they may emerge differently with each printing. The excitement and the challenge in this type of artmaking is to both surrender to, as well as harness, the accidental and emergent.

When shapes or marks emerge, we tend to want to define them through simile or metaphor: this is like that. Jane Bennett argues there is something deeper going on here than the merely associative, shape she suggests performs a direct kind of communication which links the human with the ‘vegetal’ essence of life. As she points out, Thoreau discovered this watching the ways water congeals with globules of thawing earth at the cusp of spring. He was suddenly struck by the ‘hieroglyphics’ of this sandy watery: for him suddenly everything, everybody was a congealed droplet…. There in the nose, that shape, a droplet, there in the tip of the finger, that shape again, a droplet, then in the shape of the eye, the nipple, the toe. The world, and all of us, a multitude of droplets.

Noticing these shapes that are us, that are everywhere and that dance and become something else, links us to the viscous materiality of things. As Thoreau says in another place: ‘there is nothing inorganic’.

Bennett suggests that this ‘mode of communication that proceeds via shape’ connects us to not only new ways of seeing but also new ways of being. Once attuned to these affiliative sensory connections “you become alert to them, and then there’s a slight but real kaleidoscopic shift in everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and think. What becomes a little more sensible, conceivable, and plausible is the existence of a web of cross-body, shapely communications that subvents or is only vaguely hooked into more word-reliant networks. One may start to experience oneself less as an intersubjective being and more as an inter- and intra- twined shape.” (Bennett 2017: 103) 

Bennett, J., 2017. ‘Vegetal life and onto-sympathy’ in Keller, C. and Rubenstein, M.J. eds., Entangled worlds: Religion, science, and new materialisms. Fordham Univ Press. pp.89-110.

Merleau-Ponty, M., 1933, ‘Eye and Mind in M Smith (ed), 1993, The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader: Philosophy and painting. Northwestern University Press.

Intimacy and technologies: a pre-history

There have always been technologies of intimacy, they are not the product of our internet age. We think, we learn, we love with people but often through things. The gift, the love letter, the dowry. The romance novel, the lovers’ hideaway, the celebrity crush, the diary, the Grindr profile. Memoirs, rituals, hashtags and funerals. Intimacy is always virtual even when it is at its most sensuously physical. It is mediated by memory, story and hope.

Bernini’s St Teresa and a Grindr profile are both snapshots of longing. Both represent bodies turned towards the other. Both tell us something about virtual intimacy.

Intimacy is a liminal space that connects us to something/someone whether that’s through screens, through falling in love with history, through bodies rubbing up against each other and dissolving, or through believing that an angelic arrow is piercing your insides with mystic fire. It’s also about bodies taking flight, refusing to settle. It’s troubling and wonderful.

But that all sounds too exceptional, because intimacy is also quotidian, it’s what Kathleen Stewart has called ‘ordinary affect’:

a surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal—not about one person’s feeling literally becoming another’s but about bodies literally affecting one another and generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water. (2007:128)

Love, especially queer love, is what some queer theorists have called a public feeling (Cvetkovich, A., 2007). The web and other digital technologies both extend and complicate that publicness, but queer love, has never been a private, self-contained emotion. We have always carried into our private moments both the weight and the possibilities of queer history.

We grapple with love and sex and hope and shame and with our first unexpected gifted moments of joy and pain through the only tools we have. There are the things we are told and the things that we come to know, each edging up against the way it seems things are. Both our personal histories and those public structures of feeling shape that journey to understand and to become intimate. For me this tangle of intimacy has always been about love, sex and religion.

Excerpt from my latest BentStreet piece for their terrific special issue Love from a Distance: Intimacy and technology in the era of COVID19. It’s a meditation on the technology of narrative through the lens of Robert Gluck and Margery Kemp

David Wojnarowicz’s lips

‘Untitled (Face in Dirt) 1990-1993’ | David Wojnarowicz

1.

The Song of Solomon, the bible’s surprisingly erotic master poem, begins with a kiss.

‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of his lips …’

This astounding poem is filled with the sensory world of the lover: the smell of him, the caught sight of his nakedness, the taste of him; but it is here with the kiss that it begins. With the lips.

When our lips part, what is that space between?

What do our lips remember? What do they long for? What do they wet?

2.

David Wojnarowicz had beautiful lips. Full, fleshy, seductive.

In a reverie that might be a dream, a memory, a fiction, Wojnarowicz writes of wandering through a labyrinthine structure following the hint of a boy: first it is the wind at his heels that blows past as a door opens and shuts, then the hum of his red jacket in the distance. Then the lure of his lips:

‘I could feel his lips against mine from across the room, tasting reefer or milk on them as he disappears through the square hole in the ceiling …’

Then he falls right into the taste of him.

‘Like water falls from the sky I leaned in close and slid down and unsnapped his jeans button by button using only my teeth. He was wearing no underwear and I peeled back the flag of his trousers, his dick falling neatly out to rest on my lips …’

What do our lips anticipate? What do they follow? What do they consume?

………… This is an excerpt from a longer meditation on David Wojnarowicz the American writer, visual artists and HIV/AIDS activist. Full piece available at BentStreet

Apocalyptic Signs: how we improvise the search for meaning in disaster

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During the last week, daily news of the Boston Marathon bombings and its aftermath has generated fear and a frenzy of analysis. Even though the scale and context is very different immediate references to September 11 2001 proliferated. One witness told the BBC it felt “like new York all over again” another witness described the aftermath to USA Today as “like a scene from 9/11”.

September 11 has become an archetype for contemporary apocalypse and concepts from apocalyptic studies can help us make sense of some of the news and the way it is being processed.

The apocalyptic is a world view found in all religions but in the West one which draws its ideas from the opaque last book of the bible: The Book Of Revelation. This book predicts the end of the world in a series of cryptic visions of wars, plagues, disasters, multi headed beasts and cruel torture that ultimately ushers in a new millennium – a thousand year reign of peace. When disaster strikes apocalyptic thinking creeps in. It has become a deeply embedded Western template for constructing contemporary events. In the words of feminist theologian Catherine Keller many groups from politicians to the news media are in the grip of an “apocalypse habit”.

Rhetorical use of calamity

Scholars have long argued that catastrophic events seed development of apocalyptic fervour. They have looked to the prevalence of social or natural catastrophic events or psychological dissatisfaction among apocalyptic groups to explain how a prevailing anomie or break down of social meaning interacts with a compelling event to produce an apocalyptic mindset. However in arguing for a rhetorical view of the apocalypse Stephen O’Leary argues that sociological or psychological explanations are not complete explanations of either specific or general outbreaks of apocalyptic fervour. He suggests that the persuasive force of apocalyptic argument is often the key facilitating factor:

“Even if we allow that events such as earthquakes, wars, and depressions are experienced as disasters by virtually everyone, not every event of this kind is accompanied by an increase in apocalyptic conversion. Some occurrences, on the other hand, are viewed as disasters because a rhetor succeeds in persuading an audience with this definition; and only rhetoric can turn any disaster, real or perceived, into a sign of the imminent end…The issue is not whether audiences are predisposed by such experiences to accept apocalyptic arguments, but how apocalypse contextualizes disasters as a ”rhetorical use of calamity.”

Although large sections of the media have quickly claimed this as an apocalyptic event screaming headlines of Terror, what has been notable in the response to the Boston Bombings is the restraint with which President Obama has framed the bombings: pleading with Americans to avoid a rush to judgment. Obama did engage with a “rhetorical use of calamity” but he chose to focus on the millennial – hopeful – aspects of the apocalyptic drama not the cataclysmic. He used the catastrophic events to assert that in the response to disaster Americans have “seen the character of our country once more.” In this way he reclaimed the apocalyptic as “revelation” of hope rather than calamity. This is in sharp contrast to President Bush’s post September 11 rhetoric of “an axis of evil” and an apocalyptic delineation of enemies: if you are not with us you are against us.

Semiotic promiscuity

Because the apocalyptic tradition emerges out of a series of cryptic visionary texts a key mark of the “apocalypse habit” is scouring “the signs of the times,” for “wars and rumours of wars” (Matt 26:6) that might confirm the pattern of the end times.

Richard Landes says that for those “who enter apocalyptic time everything quickens” and they become “semiotically aroused”, they seek patterns and meaning in both big and small events. Christopher Partridge calls this tendency to latch onto news and other events and view them through the apocalyptic frame: “semiotic promiscuity”. Albert Baumgarten argues that apocalyptic movements deploy what he terms a “spiritual radar” in this process:

“A spiritual radar goes on to seek confirmation of the millennial message in a variety of contexts, including events of the age, both good and bad (sometimes even good and bad at the very same time), chronological reckonings of different sorts and Biblical interpretation. This search proceeds by triangulation: as many different independent lines of argument as possible are developed to confirm the conclusion that the end is in fact near.”

As Jesse Walker has pointed out this mentality has clearly been on view in the media in the last week. Immediately after the bombings commentators were seeking clues: did this mesh with Al-Qaeda’s tactics, did the date – Patriot’s Day – indicate a homegrown right wing plot. The scanning of CCTV footage and other digital images by both the FBI and ameuter sleuths and the foraging on suspects social networking sites became a particularly contemporary versions of this apocalyptic “semiotic arousal”. But as one moderator of the crowdsourcing site Reddit acknowledged the frantic search for signs and tips can lead to “witch hunts” such as the targeting of missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi.

Improvisational millennialism

Michael Barkun points out that many of the contemporary millennial or apocalyptic groups do not fit the standard typology of either religious or secular. Some movements engage in what he calls “improvisational millennialism:” they draw from a variety of disparate sources such as Revelation, Nostradamus, “New Age” spirituality and right wing politics.

“The appeal of these collages lies in their claim to provide holistic and comprehensive pictures of the world. The variety of their elements implies that the belief system can explain a comparably wide range of phenomena, from spiritual to the scientific and the political. The combinations also suggest that apparent contradictions can be resolved, and that an underlying unity transcends outward differences.”

The emerging picture of Tsarnaev brothers does not suggest a clear ideological picture. Yes there are extremist videos on Tamerlan’s YouTube channel, but there is rap, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones on Dzhokhar’s Twitter account. The New York Times says they had feet in two worlds but the reality is like most contemporary multimedia literate youth their feet, their eyes and their hearts were dancing fast across many screens, drawn into many worlds.

It is very likely that they were improvising anger – drawing signs from many sources and a range of ideologies – just as we have been trying to improvise hope and meaning as we confront disaster and tragedy. This does not make either their anger or our hope any less real or troubling.

 

Why you can’t expect any real change from the new pope

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Towards the end of the pontificate of John Paul II a genial Melbourne priest said to me: “You just wait until the Pole falls off his perch – the Holy Spirit will rush through the church.” He sincerely believed that John Paul’s conservative leadership was an anomaly and a future pope with a progressive vision would save the church.

It puzzles me that both progressives in the church and journalists continue to talk and write as if change within the church is still possible. There are in fact very few signs that the church, at a structural level, is open to change in any meaningful way.

The ABC’s Michael Rowland interviewing the Sydney Archdiocesan spokesman Fr Brian Lucas, straight after the papal election yesterday asked whether the election of Pope Francis would be a disappointment for moderate Catholics because of the Argentinian’s strong positions on abortion and gay marriage. While in some senses Rowland was absolutely right to raise this, such discussion, assumes the papal election followed the conservative/progressive binaries of other political events. This misses the essential point. There was no progressive candidate for pope. There was not even really a moderate one.

The church will not change its views on abortion: even many of the Church’s most progressive figures such as Jesuit activist Daniel Berrigan are stridently anti-abortion.

While there are windows of hope in other areas of reform – even some Cardinals have broken ranks on the issue of women priests – any such reform will realistically take decades.

I do not hold any real hope for change on the issue of homosexuality and marriage equality. If women priests can conceivably be envisioned in some future church, decades hence, a pro-gay church is a much less obvious, much more distant possibility. But the reality is that the churches are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the legislative agenda around the world as witnessed in the new Pope’s own Argentina where marriage equality was enacted against the then Cardinal Bergoglio’s protests.

As Archbishop of Buenos Aires the new pope said plans for gay and lesbian marriage was a “destructive attempt to end God’s plan.” But even in the strongly Catholic country Bergoglio’s views on gay marriage and adoption won him a rebuke from Argentinian President Cristina Kirchner who said his statements sounded like they came from “medieval times and the Inquisition.”

The election of Bergoglio as Pope Francis took pundits by surprise even though as most of them knew he was the runner-up in the 2005 conclave that elected Cardinal Ratzinger as Benedict XVI .

Although many eyes were on the possibility of a Latin American candidate the 76 year old Bergoglio’s age was seen to count against him. His humble pastoral approach – as we now all know he apparently lived in a sparse apartment rather than the traditional Archbishop’s Palace, cooked his own meals, and traveled by bus – also seemed to count against him in an election where many claimed what the church needed was “Jesus with an MBA”.

As always there are many puzzles presented by this election. They all arise from the fact that the Vatican eschews any sense of transparency in almost any of its internal processes. So no matter what any pundit might predict there are bound to be unforseen twists and turns.

On the one hand Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told the media after the election that the choice of the humble priest who took the bus to work amounted to a “refusal of power” and “was absolutely radical.”

However his inexperience in the Roman Curial machinery may mean he will be incapable of leading much needed reform. Perhaps the election of a 76 year old with only one lung is in fact not “absolutely radical” but a “highly pragmatic” move on the part of the curial block of cardinal electors who wish to hold off effective change.

Many commentators have hailed Bergoglio’s election as signalling a strong concern for poverty and social justice. Indeed some of the new pope’s previous statements indicate a radical stance on social inequality and global social debt.

There are big questions about the new Pope’s collusion with the murderous Argentinian regime of the 1970s. His critics claim a disturbing lack of action, during General Jorge Rafael Videla’s brutal and murderous dictatorship.

Bergoglio claimed in a 2010 interview that he had in fact been a strong opponent of the regime behind the scenes.

However the question remains: what does it say about a man who is prepared to stridently and publically lead challenges against legislation to give gay men and lesbians equality while he was not prepared to publically condemn a murderous brutal dictator responsible for “disappearing” up to 30,000 opponents?

Certainly the story of Bergoglio’s true role during the post Peronist dictatorships in Argentina will now become the focus of investigative journalists around the world. It has the potential to become yet another festering sore in the ongoing public scandal of the Catholic Church.

No winds of change swept through the church after the death of John Paul II, as my priest friend hoped. His successor Benedict, has in fact, left it in a much sorrier state. The Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires has symbolically linked himself to the poor but he hasn’t shown any strategic ability to lead widespread structural change or stand up to real injustice. That’s what the church needs: not more theatrical foot washing.

Why America is still in the grip of torture

Jessica Chastain play's Zero Dark Thirty's obsessive CIA hero.

Jessica Chastain play’s Zero Dark Thirty’s obsessive CIA hero.

Last week the LA premier of Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was picketed by hood wearing activists protesting its depiction of torture. In Washington, outside the Whitehouse, Codepink, the feminist peace group, were protesting the announcement that John Brennan, a former CIA analyst said to have supported the Bush torture and rendition programs had been nominated to be the Director of Central Intelligence.

Four years after George Bush left the Whitehouse and just as President Obama is about to be inaugurated for his second term. The issue of torture is still a raw wound in the American psyche.

Bigelow’s film, Zero Dark Thirty, is an Oscars contender for best film but it has been causing controversy even before production began. It begins with graphic torture scenes and its critics say it leaves the impression that information extracted from prisoners under torture was critical in locating the al Qaida leader. Three US senators, Diane Feinstein chair of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Carl Lewin chair of the Armed Services committee and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain, found this implication so disturbing they have sent a letter of protest to Sony, the picture’s producers. Naomi Kline went so far as to call Bigelow a Leni Riefenstahl apologist for torture.

The Senators wrote that their staff had reviewed 6 million pages of intelligence material in the course of a recent review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program and it “is factually inaccurate” for the film to “imply that the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques were effective in eliciting important information related to a courier for Usama Bin Laden”.

The senators are fulsome in their condemnation of torture:

The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience. We cannot afford to go back to these dark times, and with the release of Zero Dark Thirty, the filmmakers and your production studio are perpetuating the myth that torture is effective.

The senator’s language about “going back to these dark times” seems to echo president Obama’s justification for not prosecuting Bush era crimes by stating that he believes the nation needs “to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”.

It is striking that in spite of her condemnation of torture Senator Feinstein took quite a different view of Brennan’s nomination, releasing a statement saying:

Clearly, Mr. Brennan has the qualifications and expertise to be the next CIA Director.  He has longstanding knowledge of the operations of this critical agency and also the strength to see that it follows the law.  I believe he will be a strong and positive director.

When it was rumored that Obama would nominate Brennan for the CIA job four years ago, at the start of his first term, Brennan was forced to withdraw from consideration because of his apparent support of Bush era torture policies. As a number of commentators have pointed out (here and here ) that four years on this does not seem to be an insurmountable hurdle. Polls suggest that more Americans now support torture as a valid policy in the fight against terrorism than they did four years ago.

It is tempting to argue that that is because the American public have become inoculated to the horrors of torture through its recurrent use in TV series like 24 or movies like Bigelow’s. That argument is an easy out. The more serious reason is that Obama has failed to hold anyone to account for the Bush torture and rendition policies. Even cases of brutal detainee deaths have been dismissed.  It is not just left wing activists who are calling these Bush era policies “war crimes.” In 2008 Major General Antonio Taguba who headed the inquiry into Abu Ghraib wrote:

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes…The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Both Bigelow’s film and Brennan’s nomination have become lightening rods for controversy and protest because as Senator Feinstein and her colleagues wrote in their letter of protest:

The use of torture in the fight against terrorism did severe damage to America’s values and standing that cannot be justified or expunged. It remains a stain on our national conscience.

This stain will not disappear. Perhaps Obama is right that no good purpose will be served by prosecutions but perhaps he should learn from other countries who have initiated strong process of national reconciliation and accountability. In a 2009 conference presentation Paul van Zyl the former executive secretary of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggested that America needed a similar process in the post-Bush era. It was briefly reported but is not an idea that gained traction.

There have been a series of reports and investigations such as the investigation into the CIA’s practices that Feinstein’s committee has overseen but the report has not been made public. Reports of the details of the Bush torture program have leaked out gradually through the hard work of journalists and activists rather than in a cohesive transparent process that is designed to come to terms with such a fundamental breach of national values.

Just as the Australian federal government has finally decided that only a full Royal Commission can address the national horror around child abuse only a national US commission of inquiry can hope to lay to rest the ongoing American and international horror around state sponsored torture.

 

Celebrities should come out

The New Yorker Festival 2012 - "Cloud Atlas" US Premiere, Followed By A Conversation With Aleksander Hemon And The Film's Writer-Directors

Lana Wakowski’s HRC speech negotiates the ethics of publicness much more adroitly than Jodie Foster’s Golden Globes speech

 

A lot has been written over the last few days about Jodie Foster’s Golden Globe speech. Foster’s meandering, oblique but strangely compelling speech was an immediate viral hit.

It was a coming-out speech although she didn’t mention the “l” word. But as rhetorician Sam Leith has pointed out this may be part of its power. It was as he points out a very deft performance not despite its ambiguity but because of it.

Last year another Hollywood megastar gave a coming out speech that drew comparatively little publicity.

Lana Wakowski who, with her brother Andy, directed the Matrix Trilogy accepted a Visibility award from the American GLBTI rights group Human Rights Campaign and like Foster gave a quirky, endearing but much more explicit speech about her gender identity.

Both Foster and Wakowski spoke about valuing their privacy and both mocked the pantomime of confessional culture. But Wakowski’s critique has political bite while Foster’s is little more than a jokey jibe.

Foster said that she had already long ago done her coming out to friends and family but “now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.”

Wakowski has also been out for over a decade to her friends and family – a process that started in Sydney while she was filming the Matrix – and like Foster she rejected the idea of parading her gender identity through the talk show mill. But unlike Foster her speech has real analysis:

I am completely horrified by the “talk show,” the interrogation and confession format, the weeping, the tears of the host whose sympathy underscores the inherent tragedy of my life as a transgender person. And this moment fulfilling the cathartic arc of rejection to acceptance without ever interrogating the pathology of a society that refuses to acknowledge the spectrum of gender in the exact same blind way they have refused to see a spectrum of race or sexuality.

Foster went on to mourn the lost virtues of privacy. Foster, now fifty, was accepting a career achievement award from the Golden Globes but as she noted she had been a star since she was three.

But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy. Someday, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.

Wakowski also talks about privacy but not as a nostalgic lost beauty. Again her reasons for valuing privacy and agreeing to give it up are more complex. Neither her nor her brother have done interviews for over twelve years. They valued the “egalitarian invisibility” of anonymity which gives you a particular access to civic space and allows a regular participation in public life, she says.

After completing their last film Cloud Atlas, for a variety of reasons they began to discuss whether they might do interviews. During these discussions Wakowski recalled a line from one of the characters in the film. The character says: “If I had remained invisible, the truth would have remained hidden and I couldn’t allow that.”

Wakowski comments: “she says this aware that even at the moment she’s saying it that the sacrifice she has made will cost her her life…. I start to understand just how complex the relationship between visibility and invisibility has been throughout my life.”

In the rest of the speech Wakowski recounts a number of key incidents in her movement from invisibility to visibility.

We live in a radically new environment that media academic Jeff Jarvis calls “the age of publicness”. He argues that the fact that we now live much of what was once regarded as private in the public domain has brought great personal and communal benefits. It enables better collaboration. It breaks down taboos. It enables the “wisdom of crowds”. And it improves relationships. It enables gay men, lesbians and trans people to live open and productive lives.

Jarvis has written about this both as a media theorist and as a public survivor of prostate cancer. He argues convincingly that by going public about his cancer in talks and blog posts he not only contributed to an environment that may encourage other men to be tested but he gained lots of useful information and support in response.

Privacy advocates are quick to remind us about the ethics of privacy. In his book Public Parts Jarvis argues that we need to think about both the ethics of privacy and the ethics of publicness. While we are certainly obliged to think carefully and act respectfully when handling the informational lives of others, we also need to think ethically about the impact of our own public declarations. Ethics are about how we contribute to the public good and we do this as much through sharing publically as we do by respecting the private lives of others. Jarvis again uses the cancer example. By being public a breast cancer patient might inspire other women to get examined, or her public declaration may even reveal a up a cluster of cancers in her environment that need investigation.

It is strikingly clear that Wakowski has thought long and hard about the ethics of publicness while Jodie Foster remains focused on the values of privacy.

Wakowski realises the public good that comes from visibility – the lives that might potentially be saved – and knows this far outweighs any abstract value that might attach to her privacy. That is often what ethical decision making is about: weighing up the relative costs and benefits of two seemingly mutually exclusive actions. She concludes:

[As a teenager] I couldn’t find anyone like me in the world and it felt like my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others. If I can be that person for someone else [pause, applause] then the sacrifice of my private civic life may have value. I know I am also here because of the strength and courage and love that I am blessed to receive from my wife, my family and my friends. And in this way I hope to offer their love in the form of my materiality to a project like this one started by the HRC, so that this world that we imagine in this room might be used to gain access to other rooms, to other worlds previously unimaginable.

There may well be complex personal reasons why celebrities remain in the closet but to justify it with a nostalgic appeal to the “beautiful” days of lost privacy is no longer ethically convincing.

Apocalypse 2013

Jaden Smith stars in M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth...1000 years after the cataclysm

Jaden Smith stars in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth…1000 years after the cataclysm

 

The last few years have begun with predictions of the Apocalypse hanging over us.

2011 was supposed to bring the Rapture with US preacher Harold Camping first saying it would come in May then readjusting his sights to October. Last year, of course, brought us the Mayan Apocalypse, which passed with lots of parties but no lasting fireworks just before Christmas.

With solar activity expected to reach a cyclical peak in 2013 this year was shaping up as another big year for apocalyptic fears however NASA have recently downgraded their predictions for solar storms. So does this mean that we can have a year off apocalyptic frenzies?

Probably not.

A look at Hollywood’s release list for this year tells us that 2013 will be anything but apocalypse free.

Diabolo Cody’s remake of the Sam Rami classic The Evil Dead continues the zombie explosion of recent years while Brad Pitt also gets to run from a zombie apocalypse and go all out to protect his family in World War Z

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Tom Cruise, Will and Jaden Smith and Guillermo Toro all have post-apocalyptic blockbusters scheduled and this year we even get apocalyptic comedy. The Shaun of the Dead team are back with Worlds End where five mates unite for a pub crawl that could literally end all pub crawls.

Closer to home the National Geographic Channel’s new season of Doomsday Preppers begins this week. Their episode guide promises stories of a tornado-fearing farmer building an underground Noah’s Ark for his animals and a family man preparing for a nuclear-powered terrorist attack. The series brings us weekly stories from the survivalist movement who are going all out to prepare for the worst.

When Doomsday Prepper’s first season launched last year it fitted the 2012 zeitgeist but the new season has a more eerie resonance with the widely reported news that the Sandy Hook school shooter’s mother, Nancy Lanza, was a prepper.

As J. M Berger pointed out in Foreign Policy it is far too easy to blame either his mother’s enthusiasm for guns or her survivalist beliefs for the horrific events in Newtown. However survivalist doomsday beliefs have been associated with a number of other terrorist and shooting deaths. Berger points out that there is very little research about the mental state of preppers. However he believes “anecdotal observations” point to a higher incidence of mental illness among hardcore preppers than in the general population. He adds:

The nature of their beliefs and social networks may create obstacles to diagnosis and treatment. There can be fine lines between reasonable fear, intense fear, and irrational fear, and some preppers subscribe to conspiracy theories that are completely nuts, focused on supposed threats from sinister “chemtrails” to the Illuminati (or both and then some). World ending, conspiratorial beliefs are easy to dismiss as symptoms of possible mental illness but sociologists, psychologists, theologians and literary scholars who have studied apocalyptic narratives and beliefs are more inclined to speak of them as a form of sense making. We do after all live in a nerve wrecking unstable world where in fact preparation for disaster is anything but crazy.

Apocalypse is the Greek name of the last book of the Christian Bible and colloquially it has come to mean a world-ending catastrophe because of that book’s fiery visions of plaques, famines, earthquakes, wars and global slaughter. But the word is Greek for “revelation” or “unveiling”. The proliferation of apocalyptic myths are in fact trying to tell us something, trying to reveal something. And their message is just as much about a possible golden future as it is about a gloomy end. The apocalyptic myth is uniquely associated with the utopian: they are two sides of the one coin. The bible’s Book of Revelation is filled with horrible world-ending visions but it ends with the promise of 1000 years of peace.

Even Hollywood’s slate of apocalyptic disaster films aren’t as black and white as they seem. Western Australian academic Mick Broderick has suggested that rather than analyse these films, which undoubtedly celebrate a dazzling array of cataclysmic moments, under the rubric of the “aesthetics of disaster,” as Sontag famously did, they ought more rightly be seen as being primarily about survival.

The apocalyptic myth, which seems to exist in one form or another in all cultures, is doing what all classic myth does. It is trying to hold in tension two opposite possibilities and imagine what might emerge.

American writer Rebecca Solnit might be described as an archetypal apocalyptic writer. She first came to fame with a book that contrasted the disaster impregnated landscape of the Nevada nuclear test site and the paradisiacal Yosemite National Park. In her latest book A Paradise Built in Hell she has written about how communities come together and surprise with their resourcefulness in times of disaster. Just before Christmas last year Solnit issued a call to arms claiming 2013 was “Year Zero” for the planet. Like other activists Solnit is concerned that we are reaching a tipping point in the ongoing environmental crisis, perhaps a point of no return. But Solnit like a true apocalypticist uses this grave fact to point towards a revelation:

The reasons for acting may be somber, but the fight is a gift and an honor. What it will give you in return is meaning, purpose, hope, your best self, some really good company, and the satisfaction of being part of victories also to come. But what victory means needs to be imagined on a whole new scale as the news worsens.

She spends the rest of her article outlining the proliferation of creative grassroots responses to climate change rather than the standard list of worsening indicators.

Theologian Catherine Keller calls this attitude “counter-apocalyptic”. It is not ignoring the disaster to come nor is it merely anti-apocalyptic, which runs the risk of buying into easy black and white posturing of its own. It is a posture of hope that stands firmly in the swirl of apocalyptic omens predicting bad endings and dreams a future. A future that Solnit reminds us is only built through imagination, hope and hard work.

A shorter version of this was published in The Conversation