#but colonial institutions will perpetuate colonialism unless we do something about it

[hildifons-hairyfoot]

*rubbing my hands together (evil version)* ooh hohoho my socages!!

[grantebanja]

In the midst of the current pandemic and the recent protests on Black Lives Matter, we set out some information on the topic as below.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) began as a trending topic on Twitter in 2016, the current wave of protests were triggered by the death of George Floyd and a number of other black people in the U.S.

The core message of BLM is about people coming together in allyship against racism, essentially ‘Black Lives Matter as much as everyone else’s lives and should be treated as such.’

Black Lives Matter is a movement for social justice and not a political organisation, despite people acting as self-appointed spokespeople and making claims on its behalf.

There is no specific charter or set of policies of BLM that all its supporters subscribe to.

To properly tackle this treatment of black people under the law and within society there have been calls for the identification of, and an end to, systematic and institutional racism.

A Brief History

I have written a piece below to attempt to speak to those that wish to read on about the issues and suggest some ways to address them.

I must preface this by saying these are my own personal views and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

I feel compelled to add some gravity to this. These issues of injustice under the law are distressing and pressing to many UK based black people because they mirror the daily experience also faced here, albeit to a lesser degree of violence.

No single individual, unless knowingly and overtly racist, should feel any personal guilt or shame from this piece.  We can however look to learn so as to effect change in the future.

The piece is designed to give some insight into the issue of racism and discrimination and how it can manifest itself in our daily life.

I am happy to discuss any of this article with any individuals in confidence.

 A Brief History…

In order to tackle the issue of systemic and institutional racism, one has to first look at its causes and its effect. We know its effect is the discrimination of black and non-white people under the law and many other measurable metrics.

Racism is the discrimination of people based on the colour of their skin and their being in a different ‘race’.

People are born indiscriminate, thus any inherent biases are learnt behaviour.

This raises the question why have the learning and ergo teaching of this racial discrimination become so commonplace to systemic and institutional proportions?

The answer, lies in Europe and their American cousins’ history of imperialism and colonialism. This started with the enslavement of Africans and the commodification of black people’s lives and land.

people in the UK have always been taught that the original insurrections into Africa were about introducing religion and civilising the natives. Similar ‘missions’ and methods were adopted by Europeans in every inhabited continent across the world. However, what ensued was chattel enslavement, and the subsequent African colonisation, which remains one of the biggest atrocities in human history.

The resulting enrichment of the European countries and the U.S on the back of these atrocities, I believe has been stripped or ‘airbrushed’ from national consciousness. There is very little collective or national guilt about this fact, in the same way there is with other atrocities in human history.

In an attempt to justify these atrocities and the imperialism that ensued, the ideology that that these missions were to introduce civility, where there had once been savagery and backwardness, were invented. This resulted in concerted effort to portray black people as ‘savage’ and ‘backward’.

This was the inception of the racist agenda toward black People.

 How Does This Affects Us ALL Today?

The effect of this agenda to portray black people as ‘savage’ and ‘backward’ has evolved over the subsequent years to less insidious stereotypes, many of which you are aware of.

It all stems from a perception perpetuated through media; from outright racist or stereotypical depictions to the current use of softer language or perspectives taken on white people doing exactly the same thing black people do. This has been propagated by socio-economic policy and generally taught down through generations, which has resulted in an implicit and often unconscious bias, that affects the way black people are viewed and treated by wider society.

Studies show that black people are disproportionally over represented in reports on crime, acting roles for black men are disproportionately hyper athletic, criminal or intimidating characters, punishment for crime, arrest rates, school expulsion rates and career progression. Nearly every metric of the standard of human life has black people at the negative end.

The main stereotype that has resulted to the unjust killing of black people is that they are ‘innately violent and criminal’. General stereotypes for black women are as loud, disruptive, aggressive, opinionated, feisty and domineering characters.

At the sharp end, these implied biases often impact the way police will treat a black suspects, judges will give harsher sentences or how a recruiter interviews.

In the more middle ground, there are micro-aggressions; which are comments or actions that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally states a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalised group. It can be as innocent as complimenting a black colleague on something that is taken for granted by all other colleagues, as it reinforces the stereotype that we are somehow an exception to the rule.

Being acutely aware of how we as a race of people are portrayed, makes black people adopt unnatural characteristics. For black women it often leads to them often adopting submissive non-confrontational personas to avoid such stereotypes. This corrective behaviour can take away from the strong assertive characters that others without this insecurity benefit from. As such their true potential may never been seen, to an employer’s detriment.

But I’m personally not racist

Probably not, but throughout time, this implicit bias has resulted in black people not being afforded the same human & civil rights, opportunity and general treatment as our white counterparts.

This trend is generally prevalent in every measurable metric of the human experience; healthcare, housing, education, careers and justice under the law. There is a wealth of statistics, facts and figures globally to back this assertion up.

These incidents are symptoms of systemic discrimination, where the systems are often setup in a way that unfairly impacts people of colour. So although the people working within these systems may not have discriminatory views, they are inadvertently perpetuating a system that inherently is.

The resulting issues of this systemic discrimination over numerous generations has assisted in the reinforcing negative stereotypes and the biases mentioned earlier.

How does it make many ‘Black People’ feel?

These issues form an insight into the ‘black experience’ and leads to many black people feeling like they must ensure that they act in a way that does not re-inforce these stereotypes and feeling personally ashamed when others do. As mentioned, this leads to having to ensure you correct all your behaviour, all of the time, in a way that people of other ethnicities do not. Enhanced corrective behaviour and an almost religious like adherence to always ensuring that you are in control.

For instance, it is rare that you would see a black person act emotively or confrontationally to a situation in the workplace, where people from other racial backgrounds when confronted with the same scenario would.

Can you think of a time a black person in your office has ever raised their voice, cried, and been ashamedly drunk at a work event, outwardly bullish or confrontational?

I can think of many instances, I cannot think of one where that person was black.

I am not arguing that this behaviour is acceptable, or that any person should not adopt some adaptive behaviour for the work environment. The point is that others do not carry the need for such enhanced corrective behaviour to ensure they are not be judged by their race and reinforce the negative stereotypes.

There is also an overarching feeling of not being comfortable enough to correct or address behaviours and systems you know to be inherently discriminatory for fear of being labelled a troublemaker.

In many ways, it’s just easier to ignore and swallow small indignities and instances of casual racism. It’s easier not to ask the Security Guard why he asked me for ID but not my white colleague. It is often not worth challenging the small things, as a) it can get exhausting b) it can get you the label of ‘playing the race’ card and c) it’s probably worth choosing which battles are worth fighting.

These are examples of workplace specific issues that nearly all black people live with. Not to mention the wider issues that have to be navigated throughout daily life.

It should noted that, any marginalised group may have experienced the some of the same issues in microcosms, but they tend not to have the implicit connotations and stereotypes to contend with. Most other groups also have the opportunity to assimilate to the dominant culture either immediately or generationally, black people and indeed all people of colour do not.

[marginalgloss]

unclean without and within

From time to time while reading Patrick O’Brian’s novels in the Aubrey-Maturin series I stop and search them for signs of late style. By this I mean the sense of an ending, or at least the feeling that there is surely more of them behind me than there is in front. I recently finished The Wine-Dark Sea, which is the sixteenth instalment in a series that began in 1969 and ended with the publication of a final (unfinished) volume in 2004. This one came out in 1993, with the author well into his 70s; almost twenty-five years after the first in the series. 

Yet such a progression of time is scarcely evident from the text: this is unmistakably the same writer who started out with Master and Commander and Post Captain all those years ago. If you were to read them back to back, they’d seem less contiguous than seamlessly continuous. It is not for nothing that some readers describe this series as really being instalments in one vast novel completed over the course of perhaps a third of a man’s lifetime.

This is not to say that there’s no change in style, no progression, no growth. To take an obvious example, by now the author has become much more dextrous when it comes to the handling of the naval jargon for the benefit of the casual reader. The books become more comfortable dwelling in the interiority of their characters, sometimes to unusual and oblique effect. And of course our heroes have aged a bit, but not much; for several books now Jack and Stephen are referred to in ways that suggest the onset of late middle age, but what exactly this means is never quite clear. Age, here, is like a layer of dust that settles quickly but can be blown away at a moment’s notice when required. Much like how the HMS Surprise itself vanished for several books before appearing with most of its old crew again, O’Brian is not above grinding the authorial gears, bending the rules of historical fiction to get what he wants at times. Such is the writer’s prerogative. 

I thought the previous book, Clarissa Oakes, was a rare misfire; by comparison The Wine-Dark Sea is very much a return to form. It finally details the completion of a journey which I think was first mentioned way back in The Letter of Marque. As if to compensate for the relative quietude of its predecessor, this is a story crowded with incident. There’s a couple of great sea-chases, an erupting volcano, a thrilling sequence in an ice floe, and a bigger than usual helping of Napoleonic banter and intrigue by land. We even get a trip way up into the Andes, and a terribly bloody battle with pirates (rarer than you’d think in this series). All of which is to say that at this stage in the books, there is still no sign of the author slowing down.

To detail the story would be somewhat besides the point here. The form of this novel is mostly given over to the picturesque; much like those earliest books in the series, it is a series of events loosely connected by plot but mostly engendered by chance. Perhaps the most interesting character in this instalment is Dutourd, a French captain mentioned briefly in the last book but only met properly here. He is a would-be revolutionary and accidental privateer, an apparently sincere idealist dedicated to setting up a new kind of society in whatever colony will have him and his gunboat. Naturally, Jack is fairly frank in his contempt:

‘From the first Jack Aubrey had disliked all that he had heard of Dutourd: Stephen described him as a good benevolent man who had been misled first by ‘that mumping villain Rousseau’ and later by his passionate belief in his own system, based it was true on a hatred of poverty, war and injustice, but also on the assumption that men were naturally and equally good, needing only a firm, friendly hand to set them on the right path, the path to the realisation of their full potentialities. This of course entailed the abolition of the present order, which had so perverted them, and of the established churches. It was old, old stuff, familiar in all its variations, but Stephen had never heard it expressed with such freshness, fire and conviction. Neither fire nor conviction survived to reach Jack in Stephen’s summary, however, but the doctrine that levelled Nelson with one of his own bargemen was clear enough, and he watched the approaching boat with a cold look in his eye.’

Stephen is a little more nuanced — and sarcastic — in his critique. After being asked what he thinks of democracy, he appears to avoid the question, pleading etiquette:

‘…we nevertheless adhere strictly to the naval tradition which forbids the discussion of religion, women, or politics in our mess. It has been objected that this rule makes for insipidity, which may be so; yet on the other hand it has its uses, since in this case for example it prevents any member from wounding any other gentleman present by saying that he did not think the policy that put Socrates to death and that left Athens prostrate was the highest expression of human wisdom, or by quoting Aristotle’s definition of democracy as mob-rule, the depraved version of a commonwealth.’

Between Aubrey’s stolid conservatism and Maturin’s cynicism, it is difficult to extract much which is admirable about Dutourd from O’Brian’s writing. Perhaps the best we can say for him is that he seems to have a genuine concern for the wellbeing of the men around him. But he is not a leader. Being genuine in this world seems to count for very little unless you have the capability to back it up.

Given the constant level of contempt aimed at Dutourd throughout, I wonder if it’s possible to salvage a consistent political perspective from these books. There’s a gentle but consistent conservatism, of course, that comes from the overwhelming faith throughout in the institution of the navy — a faith only partly related to the actual men who serve in it, and which has little or nothing to do with a sense of Britishness or national identity. The thing above all for O’Brian is the nature of the service, as exemplified by what it takes to operate one of the most complex engines of war ever designed. This, for him, is society; it is not an ideal society, but it is an immensely capable example of one. In Dutourd we see one whose only goal is to undo that society, and replace it with something decentred, nebulous, suspicious.

The pleasing contrast in the series always comes from comparing this conservatism to Maturin’s revolutionary liberalism, itself tempered with doubt towards all institutions. But as the series goes on it seems like Stephen’s most defining characteristic is that he has no faith in anything except himself. His concern for the welfare of his fellow man seems sincere, at least when a scalpel is in his hand, but it isn’t heartfelt; were he living on land, we can’t really imagine him working as a surgeon, either for profit or out of the goodness of his heart. He lives for the moments when he is alone in nature. And in that regard he seems like a figure who exemplifies a certain kind of libertarianism, one which is sometimes associated with the later years of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Less Rousseau, more Thoreau. 

But Maturin’s gift, and his curse, is that he alone amongst the crew seems to possess a particular sense of aloneness. I love, for example, this little passage, from his trip into the Andes:

‘So it was: yet the western sky was still dark violet at the lower rim and as he looked at it Stephen remembered the words he had intended to write to Diana before he put his letter to the candle: ‘in this still cold air the stars do not twinkle, but hang there like a covey of planets’, for there they were, clear beads of unwinking gold. He could not relish them however; his dream still oppressed him, and he had to force a smile when Eduardo told him he had reserved a piece of bread for their breakfast instead of dried potatoes, a piece of wheaten bread.’

That pretty image followed, by the pang of self-awareness — the memory of a dismal dream, his faraway wife hung for some strange crime — and then that old O’Brian trick of breaking through with indirect discourse that gently mimics speech. ‘A piece of wheaten bread.’ 

One more thing I want to add. There’s something very peculiar about the fate of Martin here. I always found something feminine about his portrayal, perhaps in part because his traditional role in these books is to be Stephen’s conversational partner while Jack is indisposed. Theirs is a friendship in which intimacy seems to have been traded in for constant peaceful companionship. 

Eventually Martin becomes such a constant presence that he seems almost like a chaste spouse to Stephen. I don’t think O’Brian ever explicitly describes him as effeminate; but as a man, he doesn’t quite match up to the capabilities of his shipmates. Jack is perpetually uneasy with him, and I’m not sure it will suffice to say that he’s only suspicious of Martin’s authority on doctrinal matters. But the suspicion is strange, because it seems rootless. Martin isn’t outwardly threatening. He’s sensitive, observant, yet utterly hopeless as a physical presence compared to either of the leads. He’s perfectly pleasant, but not exceptional.

In this book, something odd happens. In Clarissa Oakes, Martin’s role as occasional companion appeared usurped by the titular woman smuggled aboard the ship. Now, it seems like O’Brian was looking for a way to get him out of the way, perhaps in order to set up a situation further down the line in England. Martin’s relationship with Clarissa becomes the instrument for bringing this about. Here is Stephen on the subject:

‘…Whether he has the disease I cannot tell for sure without a proper examination, though I doubt he has it physically: metaphysically however he is in a very bad way. Whether he lay with her or not in fact he certainly wished to do so and he is clerk enough to know that the wish is the sin; and being also persuaded that he is diseased he looks upon himself with horror, unclean without and within…’

Martin becomes desperately ill, and for a while Stephen cannot diagnose his problem. Eventually it turns out that, being tormented with guilt over an affair with Clarissa, he has poisoned himself with a desperately strong treatment for syphilis, derived from mercury. Here, perhaps, is what Jack had to be suspicious about all these years. We see this again and again in certain outlying characters in O’Brian’s world. They are tormented by a certain inner conviction, entirely irrational but thoroughly humane, that becomes not only a personal agony to the individual, but a true risk to the security of that precious narrow society.  

There is something uniquely sinister and sad about Martin’s condition here. It is as though he becomes here the ship’s equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Grey: he has somehow soaked up all the bad feeling, all the wickedness that was spread around during the Oakes incident. Ailments outside the physical have always proved entirely alien to Stephen, and so the only treatment he can conceive of is to send him on the first ship back to England. Instead of sending him to the bottom of the ocean, they send him home. 

[centaurrential]

The first.

The nice thing about blogging is that one doesn’t need to follow a strict academic essay structure: the issues and concepts I want to write about are always architectures built upon some underlying causal, foundational plot. It would be nice if we could hyperlink the written representations of our thought processes, but alas, that is one domain in which modern technology has fallen short. You might see that I jump around between topics, but I promise there are connections everywhere. So, here we go!

I’ve been hesitant to write about what ignites my passion the most.  

There are a couple of reasons for this.

For one, save for some semblance of a university degree I attempted to put together years ago, I have little in the way of ‘respectable’ credentials. I rely on my own observations of what is happening around me. A high school friend once revealed to me a technique in visual arts that has stuck with me since. “Draw what you see, not what you know to be there.” I have applied this not only to achieve realism in the scant visual artworks I have produced and which have gone unseen by most others, but also to compose a coherent understanding of my world--or in other words, everything I feel. This “motto” of sorts shows that we often ignore details about our experience that are in plain sight. Despite holding this key, I am well aware that I have not necessarily earned any institutional authority to write on the matters that compel me so--yet, as a person who has simply lived and observed, I still feel that I should express myself, for what ever it may be worth.

Second, though my risk of legal and political persecution in some form or another is not as dire as was obviously the case in the past with established thinkers, I’ve felt compelled to dress my thoughts in verse, marching what I think are critical ideas down the runway, letting the audience gently scrutinize the layers of different conceptual fabrics in motion rather than to place what is thought to be controversial on a podium, open to the personalized savagery of modern “progressive” critique. Misunderstanding is a very real fear of mine as I believe it is one of the greatest tragedies of the human condition. I suppose, as a sensitive person who is deeply emotional and deeply invested in my own thought as a means to a better world, my intent up to now has been to create a buffer of some sort between what I theorize and the ideology-driven hate that tends to characterize Internet culture (which, incidentally now, always carries a ‘social media’ component with it). But I don’t wanna hide anymore.

Something I’ve noticed about that very vehicle for thought is how utterly unforgiving it is. Someone uncovers a person’s past involving a stupid, ignorant mistake along the lines of political incorrectness and suddenly all the good they may have recently put into the world evaporates because there is some sort of twisted expectation of social perfection we’ve adopted--even though there is some overlap between this absolutist, impossible approach to other, equally fallible human beings and the tendency to wax poetic about one’s own cathartic emotional experience, along with a new awareness emerging from the remnants of self-destruction, and forcing ‘compassion’ toward oneself in light of one’s mistakes.

The message is that “I” can learn, but “you” cannot. It seems that people are so volatile these days, they’re ready to pounce without really thinking about what a person is trying to say in earnest. And while I believe that we should work hard at our collective and individual duties to skepticism, I cannot condone, to the furthest reaches of any influence I may have, the deadlock of pseudo-critical thinking when it involves scapegoating and self-righteousness.

I sense (and feel) a lot of (justified) anger, and many well-meaning individuals are looking for a place to which they can direct such intensity. The unfortunate thing is that the fire mutates into hostility toward people who don’t deserve it. Shuffle formless anger into boxes designed to look nicely and glamorously radical, and chuck it at those who--excluding the really terrible people in the world--are honest and serious about answering the questions of “how to achieve the maximum possible distance from pain”, and, “what is, essentially”, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Nothing is ever as simple as we’d like it to be.

And by the way, I find the dismissive “ok, boomer” attitude reprehensible. Like, OBVIOUSLY there are going to be differences among generations in “opinion” and lifestyles and so on. And obviously past generations have made what we now deem to be ‘mistakes’. But just like any individual who may regret past actions, whether personal or professional, one makes decisions supported by the most convincing reasons they can muster, and so they do the best they can with the knowledge they have at hand, at some particular moment. Maybe some visionaries in the past were able to extrapolate from the contemporary and predict what would happen in the future. Even if their equivalents exist in society today, we will not know for certain the downright traumatizing effects current societal mechanisms could force to manifestation in the years beyond, until they actually become fact. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And, there is wisdom that only comes through living life. That, I’m afraid, is not up for debate.

I must say this here, now. I realize I’m walking on eggshells with what I’m about to say.  But, while it is clear that there is a significant degree of ‘white privilege’ in North American society, I’d be careful to declare ‘privilege’ an inherently white experience.  It is an historical reality (and is therefore biased). Not all ‘white people’ are the same; and it is CERTAINLY not the case that it has only been ‘white people’ that enforced slavery, for example. And it is definitely true that different members of different religions and different races and different ethnicities and different cultures and different dialects have, historically, perpetuated evil across many axes. Furthermore, I believe that the explicit and intentional denigration of ‘white people’ MADE BY WHITE PEOPLE THEMSELVES is probably one of the greatest expressions of white privilege. How secure must one feel if they can freely diss their ‘own kind’ and know that nothing diabolical will happen to them? We owe justice through opportunity to people we have marginalized, but that is not the way. I just think that people are either willfully ignorant, accidentally ignorant, or have forgotten that all kinds of people can be villains, and further that a truly corrupt person will even torture people with whom they may have a great deal in common.

I tend to think that ‘intersectionality’ is a seriously important concept and is most empirically aligned with individualism. People move around more, cross-cultural contact happens more; global connection ushers cuisine, rituals and traditions, spiritual beliefs, and languages into landscapes that were previously barren of particular social technologies. The result is a person who may have many characteristics sort of in common with others who share those qualities in a scattered manner, but unless one of those forces was exceptionally prominent in the person’s life, the commonality is negligible.

Emergent from this phenomenon is the serious tension between individual self-actualization and the requirements for so-called proper functioning of the broader ‘community’ to which one feels they belong. The needs of each can often be at odds with one another, and it doesn’t appear to be an easy task to resolve this conflict. I do know that sacrifices will have to be made, as there is always a price to pay; I almost think of that as a universal law.

When I was 19 and took a philosophy of feminism class, I started noticing what problems arise when a mode of thinking is assumed to apply to a particular “community” (loosely speaking), just because its members all share some intrinsic quality. In the particular case I’m talking about, it was “being female”. When someone speaks the word ‘feminism’, it is loaded. You have liberal feminism, eco-feminism, radical feminism, third-wave feminism, black feminism, post-colonial feminism, and so on. The relevance of these various types is stretched so thinly throughout the human landscape that one could legitimately wonder why those theories should even be considered to have anything in common. In other words, how can you possibly come up with an ethic of revolution that applies universally to, I dunno, how many billion people in the world? Here’s a situation: women in the West, particularly in the Deep South, are fighting for their choice to have an abortion. Meanwhile, in some parts of India and China, female infanticide is more common than a decent person should like to admit, and that’s not because Indian and Chinese women want it! Asking someone who is thoughtful in ANY respect if they are a feminist is like asking someone if they believe in God, and that is not, nor should it be, an easy question to answer.

To be clear: what I am talking about is definition, and if you break down the etymological components of that word, you see that it is about deciding what sorts of conceptual boundaries must be drawn (the finiteness)--to determine what is included, and also what is excluded. My belief is that it is actually the interplay between those qualities intrinsic to a person and external forces placed upon us that dictate the degrees of self-satisfaction and happiness we experience.

That pain is to be avoided is generally unquestionable, though the finer details of rational action (because I do see the treatment of pain as an issue of rationality, and as something more fundamental to the exercising of rational action than market economics is) are still up for debate. And, I suppose, that is the case for many injustices that an active, voluntarily thinking society wishes to eradicate. I’d like to return to that topic some time in the future, but what concerns me today is the issue of essentialism.

Essentialism has been a problem for philosophers for a really long time. Often it is conceptualized as “what makes something that thing”, but in my view, Essence seems to lie in the realm of the experiential. In one minor paper I wrote for a metaphysics class, I argued (incompletely) that an object’s ‘essence’ could be partly defined by the function one identifies when they come into contact with said object. For example, because even though chairs can be made up of different numbers of legs, or be of different colours, or be upholstered or not, we place them into a category of ‘something to be seated upon’. But then again, there are many things that can be sat upon, and, on the other hand, one does not look at a real life dog and think of it as an object that innately serves a purpose, let alone is built for one.

So why am I talking about what seems to be an obscure and useless topic?

It is the utility of Essence that gives form to our experience. And for those who believe that we erroneously categorize and judge every single damn thing we come across in our lives, go ahead and try to reverse neurological evolution through time of geologic scale. I mean, this mode of existence came to be before we even defined what ‘values’ were.

Tangentially, my introduction to the study of philosophy started with the great divide between ‘rationalism’ (ie. some inherent structure which creates the capacity to ‘know’ already exists in a person at the time of birth) and ‘empiricism’ (the school of thought where a person only collected knowledge through experience after they were born with a ‘blank slate’ of a mind). I never understood why the distinction between rationalism and empiricism was so important, because it seemed so obvious that our system of moving through the world was a combination of the two. We see now that the belief in one to the exclusion of the other is just plain stupid: genetics, epigenetics, logarithmic counting in BABIES, education, debate, and research, all contribute to an individual’s understanding of the world. (It is this idea, too, that contributes to my belief that free will is an illusion [though a helpful one at that] and that ‘luck’ is an epistemological concept. I will also use this idea to, eventually, communicate my argument that astrology is theoretically plausible, but that involves discussing archetypes and the cyclical nature of our known world...) Note: “Epistemology” is the study of knowledge and how we come to accumulate it. I went on this tangent because I think we need to demonstrate a great deal of respect for both pre-existing neurological realities and the staggering potential of science to teach us about our environments and ourselves. There are some core things about us that we would be wrong to ignore, and unforgivably so if the sound science is right there.

We do not typically go through life coming into contact with objects or people and checking off items on a list that comprise criteria for something being what it is (unless, of course, you’re prone to collect little hints as to whether a potential lover loves you back or not.....). To do so would reduce the fluidity with which we interact with externalities. That being said, I can conceive of a time when one goes outside for a cigarette in the night and watches a creature (as I just did) that may be a cat, or that may be a raccoon, cross the road. You peer at this creature for several seconds, up until the point that you conclude, and are certain, that it is, indeed, a cat. It is then that you can move on with your life. Perhaps what helped you to come to this conclusion was a short list of criteria that separate catness from raccoonness. Obviously that would be more efficient than consulting an exhaustive mental list of “cat properties” and comparing it to a similar list, but of “raccoon properties”. But even so, by the time you’ve witnessed the cat/raccoon, you’ve already filtered out any possibility that the creature might be something else, like a stray dog, or a lizard, or a floating chair. In conclusion, I propose here that context is essential to Essence. And Essence is a fully whole sensory experience, insofar as your sensory faculties work. This is why it is so hard to define.

The social relevance of the concept of Essence is becoming more important with the emergence of identity politics, the crises in feminism, “queerness”, the feminine/masculine dichotomy, and even paradigms in psychological health. Inherent to Essence is continuity, and no one can argue against the notion that we rely on general continuity to go about our daily lives.

But out of continuity develops expectation. Expectation is immensely helpful for the reason I laid out above. Additionally, in public, we rely on a common yet tacit understanding that individual members of the public will behave in a way that is safe and appropriate for everyone. The problem is, if you have experienced a good chunk of your life, well into adulthood, having never seen an unfamiliar and idiosyncratic expression of certain properties, why WOULD you do anything else other than fumble in your acceptance that that is the way something is? Your mind scrambles to organize what you are interacting with in the way that makes the most sense.

I was once accused of being an essentialist because of some remark I made referencing biological differences between men and women. I wondered if the dude was joking because I really cannot grasp why someone would think that the differences are trivial. Lately I’ve toyed with the conclusion that there must be something essential, something bounded, about the way we express ourselves, which matches what we are that isn’t seen by absolutely everyone, including exuding femininity or masculinity. If there wasn’t something essential about these “descriptions”, why would anyone make an effort to look a certain way in the first place? Or, why would anyone have a subconscious tendency to adopt certain characteristics? The point I’m trying to make is that communication in the form of appearance is just as important as a verbal explanation of something, and can in fact be more truthful than what is verbally expressed. Whether one wants to admit it or not, you are offering information that allows others to draw conclusions about you. And it’s not that you merely fulfill a checklist of the sort that I mentioned earlier. It is that, often, though not always, each separate quality supports all the others, forming a sort of “mesh-like” coherence. If there wasn’t something essentially feminine that you identified with, or something essentially masculine that you identified with--if these things didn’t matter--there would be no point in going to great lengths to change your appearance to communicate something. (And I think this holds even in the case of the non-binary person.)

Of course, judgments are made all the time about people, which have nothing to do with being transgendered or cisgendered. A person asks you your age. Why? Because they’re collecting information about you and the particulars in the category of “age” should reveal something about you that you’re not stating explicitly. And this information is only grounded in other information the inquirer has about you. And the only reason this information might be reliable is because a consolidation of an individual’s past experiences tells them that a certain age represents an axis of consistency of mentality and/or behaviour. The deductions we make are not always accurate, but if we didn’t instinctively think of this information as important, we wouldn’t seek it!

I will now apply the above problem to sort out why we are in such a mess, socially. First of all, the person is born into expectation of behaviour. That expectation depends on their sex at birth (assuming the person is not intersex), their social, economic, political class, the levels of education their immediate family members have achieved, their spiritual practices, et cetera. It seems to me that feminism arose in the first place because of the particular kind of anticipation of behaviour that swirls around whether you have a testicle-penis or a uterus-vagina combination. The traditionally ‘male’ realm was the unexplored frontier to many women; it was one of excitement, possibility, and opportunity, and arguably more freedom than the domain to which women were typically assigned: the home. Women can produce babies, and if you could produce babies then you SHOULD produce babies, and you should care for them too. And not only that, but by virtue of the fact that you are a mother you can’t even fathom leaving your babies behind. I haven’t yet come across a proper articulation of why this point is so crucial to understand. The women who have the term “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) slung at them are attacked by people who don’t understand that this fundamental difference in expectation between female-born individuals and male-born individuals is looming in the background, and how damn well important it really is, because it inevitably shapes a person’s perception of the world and quite possibly the expectations they have of other people! And the perception that falls upon you isn’t just something you can shed on a whim. And also, why are people surprised that this is still an issue? Even as advanced creatures we still succumb to evolutionary forces. I don’t think any reasonable person could say that “you aren’t female even if you feel female”, but it’s not about how you “feel”. It’s about what happens between you and people once they figure out a vital fact about you. It’s about the context in which you, a whole being, operate. You want to talk about oppression? I think your self-identity being misaligned with how other people think you should be is pretty high up there in the ranks.

So, to digress a little: the notion of changing yourself and making an impression on strangers, making a difference in the world, is intoxicating. But we enter dangerous territory when visions of child-rearing and home care become afterthoughts. Child psychologists have identified the age range between 2 and 4 to be particularly crucial in socializing children; it is at that age that they are the most impressionable with regard to how they learn to interact with others. That’s not really a huge window to make sure you ‘get it right’. I think the family unit, whatever its configuration may be, is pretty foundational to the rest of society. While many people presently carry harmful opinions about things we don’t understand, and changing those opinions tends to be rather difficult, the most radical, most powerful thing we can do to initiate reform is to make sure the children we are responsible for grow up valuing honour, kindness, and a sense of duty and justice, not just in relation to themselves and their immediate families, but to society as a whole.

People are throwing tantrums because society hasn’t given itself an overnight makeover. I think that anyone involved in politics understands, either consciously or unconsciously, that even though political institutions and bureaucracies were created by real people, they’ve sort of become fragmented away from human life and are entities of their own, floating above our heads like clouds in the higher atmosphere, and which do not have any readily identifiable boundaries. It appears that the various bodies of legislation and bureaucracies have become so bloody complex in correlation with the complexity of human interaction that they seem almost impossible to disentangle. Furthermore, ideas take a long time to die...if they ever even do.

Rather than viewing child-rearing as a burden, I choose to view it as the greatest responsibility and the greatest tool we have for genuine change. I feel, honestly, that sometimes we waste energy trying to convince people of something where there is no convincing possible. We often preach to the choir because they’re the only people who make us feel heard--but our own little choirs already know and believe what we know and believe.

So. I think, once I reviewed what I said above, that I’ve attempted to illuminate a conundrum about simultaneous utility and danger found in the act of expecting. This “study” of sorts is a microcosm of a world where darkness and light are aspects of all things. I’m convinced that the formulation of potential is expressed in binaries, but unlike computers, we are able to interpret ambiguities, and in many pockets of society people are tolerant of self-expression. With so many belief systems up for grabs, and with the world as it is in its ebbs and flows, it is up to the individual to craft their own transcendent values as a way to “orient themselves”, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson put it. Be mature and do not dismiss nuance. Challenge yourself. And for God’s sake, the next time you’re thinking of buying that innocuous avocado that’s become the symbol for the Millennial generation, ask yourself what is more important: dismantling violent and antisocial Mexican drug cartels, or supporting Mexican farmers who are trying to make their ways through life, just like every. last. one of us.

[armeniaitn]

Scholars Enlighten Armenian Armenian Community on Racial Violence, Inequality in Virtual Forum

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/society/scholars-enlighten-armenian-armenian-community-on-racial-violence-inequality-in-virtual-forum-27588-30-06-2020/

Scholars Enlighten Armenian Armenian Community on Racial Violence, Inequality in Virtual Forum

FAIR LAWN, NJ—On Tuesday, June 23, St. Leon Armenian Church of Fair Lawn, NJ, hosted a virtual forum, Racial Injustice and Responsibility with a live audience from more than 460 households. The event, which has since been viewed by an additional 600 households, examined the legacy of racial violence and inequality, and the responsibility of non-perpetrators in sustaining regimes of racism.

The event was jointly sponsored by AGBU Ararat, Armenian Bar Association, Armenian Network of America—Greater NY, Daughters of Vartan-Sahaganoush Otyag, Justice Armenia, Knights of Vartan-Bakradouny Lodge, National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Topics, St. Leon ACYOA Seniors, and Zohrab Information Center.

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As poignantly recognized by NAASR’s director of academic affairs Marc Mamigonian at the start of the forum, the support of these sponsoring organizations reflects a recognition that collectively and as individuals Armenian Americans do not exist separate from the larger issues of American life, and that racial injustice and responsibility— the theme and title of the evening’s talk—may be as large as an issue that exists in America because it lies at the root of so many other problems. 

Mamigonian moderated the discussion along with Dr. Henry Theriault, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Panelists included Dr. Jermaine McCalpin (Chair of African and African American Studies at New Jersey City University), Dr. Michael Rothberg (1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at UCLA), and Kohar Avakian (Ph.D. student in American Studies at Yale).

Diocesan Primate Bishop Daniel Findikyan opened the forum with a prayer for peace and asked God to “listen to the cry that rises from every corner of this fragile earth, from our human family torn by violent conflict.”

Bishop Daniel offered brief opening remarks endorsing the intent of the forum. “Racism is an issue that we should not be talking about only in these recent weeks of unrest,” he said, “but it’s something that should be at the core of every sermon of ours as clergy; it should be part of our regular discourse … particularly in the Armenian Church, because we have been the victims of racism … and because our creed, our faith, holds that racism in any form, differentiation among the creatures of God, is completely incompatible with the very core of what we believe.”

Just before handing the program over to the panelists for an intellectual and ethical journey, Dr. Theriault noted that, just like when confronting deniers of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides, the evening’s purpose was not to debate whether there has been and continues to be mass systemic oppression of Black and brown people in this country. He pointed out that “those who refuse to see what is going on today and what has gone on for so long are making a choice. This is not a choice we want to debate.” 

In further comparison to his and Dr. McCalpin’s advocacy for Armenian Genocide recognition and reparations, Dr. Theriault shared that “history does not just heal itself and that harms of the past—unless rectified by symbolic and material action—not only continue to have destructive impact on victims but actually increase in destructive power over time.” He closed with a recognition that a history of violence does not excuse today’s Armenians from taking responsibility in the fight against racism in the United States. “In reality,” he said, “there is no neutral place on racial injustice in the United States; it is time to pick our side.”

Prof. Rothberg elaborated on the theme of his book, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, arguing that the categories of victim, perpetrator and bystander can only give an incomplete account of a person’s connection to injustices past and present. In subtle and structural ways, he suggested, the consequences of injustice filter throughout a society and time; even those that may feel no personal or group involvement as a perpetrator can still be implicated in a prevailing system of inequity. 

“Acts of injustice,” he explained, “especially acts of racial injustice, but also gender violence, gun violence, effects of climate change, exploitation of workers, colonial violence—all these forms of violence— are only possible because a large group of implicated subjects stands behind a much smaller group of direct perpetrators or agents of violence; so what I mean by implicated subject are those of us who enable, perpetuate, inherit and benefit from both historical and contemporary injustice without directly perpetrating those injustices.” Echoing Dr. Theriault’s sentiments, he related this both to the broader contemporary American scene and the experience of Armenians and Jews who “have inherited legacies of victimization, suffering, violence, and genocide” by recognizing that “we are today implicated subjects; we are responsible for the kind of violence and racism that are affecting other people.”

Kohar Avakian–an Armenian, Black and Nipmuc scholar—offered insights from her ongoing doctoral study of racial formation in the Armenian Diaspora, detailing legal constructs and court decisions that facilitated racial and socio-economic inclusion for some while perpetuating barriers for others in Worcester, MA. She brought to light the differentiated experience of Armenians, other Asians, Blacks and Worcester’s dispossessed indigenous Nipmuc population of which she is a descendant. To grasp the nuanced dynamics of systematic racism, the emerging scholar advised viewers to consult the works of academic titans including Angela Davis, Tony Morison, Alice Walker, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Kimberle Krenshaw and Saidiya Hartman. Her plea to viewers was to look at questions of Armenian identity in new ways and from novel perspectives, including the “broader contexts of settler colonialism, slavery and Asian exclusion.”

Prof. McCalpin’s talk drew on his voluminous research on the Armenian Genocide and the transatlantic trade of Africans. He examined the evolution of systems of oppression, from enslavement to mass incarceration, inflicted upon the Black community. “Black pain is not only for Black people,” he said. “It should be the pain of everyone who loves justice” just as “the cause for justice for the Armenian Genocide is not just the responsibility of the Armenian people.” His foray into issues of denial, recognition, justice, reparations and reconciliation established explicit links between Black enslavement in the United States and the Genocide of Ottoman Armenians. He focused on levels of culpability and responsibility in maintaining and disestablishing (not reforming) our country’s racist architecture while noting that “white silence gives continued consent to police brutality and racial injustice.” He ended with a quote from author and activist Angela Davis: “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, you must be anti-racist.”

On the heels of the panel discussion, St. Leon Armenian Church has organized an online seminar for high school students titled “Names, Monuments, and Racism: A Global Perspective.” Prof. Khatchig Mouradian will lead the four week course, which explores how rethinking the words we employ and the monuments we erect in public spaces constitute important steps on the path to confronting racism and injustice. The course will examine case studies from the United States, Armenia, Turkey, Germany, Lebanon, Namibia and Japan. 

Chris Zakian also contributed to this report.

Sevan Araz

Sevan Araz is a graduate fellow with the Cyber Program at the Middle East Institute and an analyst at Catalisto, a New York-based cybersecurity firm. Mr. Araz also conducts research with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He received a B.A. in International Affairs from George Washington University.

Latest posts by Sevan Araz (see all)

Read original article here.

[dasakuryo]

If you live somewhere where everyone speaks Spanish why are you so worried about people with thick accents when they speak English if you live somewhere where you aren't required to speak English?

Translation: I amentitled gringx who can’t wrap their head around how English imperialismfunctions.

Sorry for not coming back to you sooner,

I live in a country wherepeople are required to learn English since childhood, I live in a country whereEnglish is a mandatory subject in schools since primary school (that’selementary school, in some provinces as early as first grade). I live in acountry where even kids in kindergarten have to learn English.

You know, unlike yougringxs who learn a language in high school to add it to your credits orwhatever, we actually HAVE TO learn English since we’re children. Parents knowthat their kids learning English is extremely important because as ourcollective unconscious dictate “if you want to go far in life and besomeone, you’ve to learn English, you need to know English,” this is whyparents will go out of their way to send their kids to English institutes orfind a teacher who can give them private lessons since an early age, evenparents who struggle with income and are not in an advantageous economicsituation will save money so their kids can learn English and “aspire togreater horizons”.

Our collectiveunconscious, regardless of the efforts and reassurance of teachers of tellingus the exact opposite, immediately connects accuracy and fluency withnative-like accents. Since we’re children we feel our thick, clearly non-nativeEnglish accents, are inadequate, we feel inadequate. And that’s why? Becausenative-speakers have consistently looked down on people who have a non-nativeEnglish accents, and in the USA and Europe, Latinxs accents have always beenfrowned upon and considered as a sign of our backwardness, ignorance andinferiority.

Media reflectssociety, and also has the power to pose discussions and change it. When peoplemake fun of thick accents, of non-native English accents, of Latinxs speakingSpanish, they’re making fun of Latinxs. So the fact that USA media making funof accents and using them as the punchline of a joke, or a joke in and ofthemselves, it’s problematic, is wrong, it adds to Latinxs (particularly KIDS)self-loathing of their own accents and, what’s even worse, it teaches them thatin order not to be mocked by native English speakers they have to sound likenative speakers. So kids will struggle, refuse to speak, try to mask theiraccent, try to become this carbon-copy of the native English speaker they’veseen on TV… because, nobody is mocking them.

It takes a toll onyoung people and adults learning English as a second language, the very firstthing anyone says is “I don’t speak right”, why? Because the ‘speakingright’ is synonym with native accents, because our accents are ugly, laughableand a sign of our backwardness. You know, what we get from what English nativespeaker say and perpetuate about us with their representations and mockery.

What’s that? Youthink learning English in Latin American countries ends in high school? Thinkagain, it goes on in universities, it goes on all throughout your studies ifyou want to get any higher education degree, and in many fields keeps on beingpresent when you’ve already acquired your degree. Over 90% of reference andtext books used in Universities are only available in English, there’re notranslations unless some students does it, which means that you’ve to knowEnglish in order to study. Want to get your degree? Yeah, you’ll have todemonstrate you can read and translate a whole text in English. Want to applyfor a scholarship? If you know English your chances are better? Oh, you’repursuing a career in STEMs, for example, oh well… all publications and papersare available in English, so you have to know, understand and have some degreeof proficiency in English if you want to keep up with new discoveries andtheories. You have made a breakthrough and discovered something important andwould like to present it to the scientific international community? Oh, well,guess you can only do that in English.

Which prompts thefollowing in more than a handful of people: Oh but… you don’t know English, notquite… and your accent is thick and clearly non-native, are you sure you can dothis? Remember what we all know about them, they don’t like our accents, ourskills, knowledge and qualities will be questioned as soon as we open ourmouths… are you really sure you can do this?

That’s why one of mybest friends, with one of the best GPAs has downright been telling me for yearsthat she won’t even bother to apply for a scholarship abroad. She’s brilliant,but she’s taking her accent as an obstacle instead of as an asset. You know, adirect consequence of what ill-intended, biased representations and mockery ofnon-native English accents from native English-speakers can do EVEN TO PEOPLEWHO DON’T LIVE IN AN ENGLISH SPEAKING COUNTRY.

Oh, and please, I amnot even talking about all the multinational companies which operate in LatinAmerican countries and which demand their employees with a university/collegedegree to give their job interviews in English.

We’re constantlybombarded with the message from native speakers that our English is not goodenough, that we have to pass as natives if we want to aspire to something,particularly if we come even remotely close to study and/or work with USAmericans,Europeans, and the like –if we want to better our chances and not being mockedthat’s.

Non-white Latinxsalso experience this in a whole new level, because not only does theirappearance will grant them suffering discrimination and racism, but on top ofthat they have to add their discrimination towards their accent because it isyet another sign of their otherness. Non-white Latinxs have it even harder.

Furthermore, in caseyou think I am making shit up, linguists have talked about English as animperialistic language, like Phillipson expresses:

Linguicism: the ideologies and structures which are usedto legitimate, effectuate and reproduce an unequal division of power andresources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined onthe basis of their language (i.e., of their mother tongue). This condition isbest seen within the broader context of linguistic imperialism - an essentialconstituent of imperialism as a global phenomenon involving structuralrelations between rich and poor countries in a world characterized byinequality and injustice.

Language expansion isconsidered an essential part of a core country’s policy of extending its powerand influence in order to achieve its imperialistic strategies. Phillipson holdsthat the legitimization of English linguistic expansion has been based on twonotions: ethnocentricity and educational policy, with‘ethnocentricity’ being the “practice of judging other cultures by standards ofit own.” These two practices have been used to impose a distinction betweenlanguages. It has also been a way topromote the notion of the assumed inferiority of secondary languages withrespect to the norms determined by the dominant culture.

Phillipson takes thisnotion one step further with ethnocentricity transformed into that of ‘anglocentricity’ with the consequencethat the dominance of English isjustified in terms of such oppositions as superiority/inferiority,civilization/backwardness, progress/regress, the first element of which isconstantly attributed to the dominant English language.

According toPhillipson education serves the imperialcenter by having three functions: ideological, economic and repressive. Theideological function serves as a channel for transmitting social and culturalvalues. In this role English is regardedas a “gateway for better communication, better education and higher standardsof living.” The second function – economic – legitimizes English as a means of qualifying people to contribute totheir nation and operate technology that the language provides access to.The third function – repression –serves to dominate languages.

Linguisticimperialism calls attention to the potential consequences of English teachingworldwide when center country ideologies are embedded in instruction, having the effect of legitimizing colonialor establishment power and resources, and of “reconstituting culturalinequalities between English and other languages.”

[Cited and paraphrased from

Phillipson, R. 1992.Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

-Phillipson, R. 1988.Linguicism: structures and ideologies in linguistic imperialism. In J. Cumminsand T. Skutnabb-Kangas (eds.), Minority Education: From Shame to Struggle.Avon: Multilingual Matters.]

So when someoneperpetuates the idea that thick accents and non-native English accents are tobe mocked of, which ties directly to the First-World perception of Latinxs (inthis case) as ignorant, backward, unqualified people, I have every right to bemad as hell about it. Because as a non-native English speaker and Latina I amdirectly affected by its consequences, even though living in a non-English speakingcountry.

Unlike USAmericanswho actually get to choose whether to learn Spanish or not (who cares thatthere’re more Spanish speakers in the American continent than English speakers,right?? Why should you ever have to be forced to learn that backwardlanguage??), Latin Americans don’t have a choice, we have never had a choice.That’s how linguistic imperialism functions, besides forcing us to learn aforeign language, is telling us that we won’t be taken seriously if we don’tadjust to the GoodEnglish™.

By the way, I have a non-native English accent,and I am extremely proud of it.

And finally,

[saltprogramlar]

Questions on Institutions

Vasıf Kortun

This text is an edited version of the talk that Kortun gave in October 2017 at The Museum of Contemporary Toronto Canada (MOCA), as part of The Museum Is Not What It Used To Be program series.

Exhibitions are inherently fugitive, fragile and imperfect forms. More than often they are not the most efficient narrative agencies. They cannot be taken off the shelf and leafed through like a book, replayed like a movie on a screen, or repeated as a dance step. They cannot be recovered.

Once done, they can be recalled only as the event they were not meant to be. But, they are not events. As a time-based practice they have short shelf-lives. They replace each other tediously in a simple mimicry of a convenience store. Things are put on the shelf and taken off it. The shell remains the same. The duress of incessant programming of exhibitions coming one after another with “sell-by” dates make ideas obsolete before they are exhaustively unpacked. As good as it lasts, but not for that long. Unless of course they are stale to begin with, ascribing to the condition of the so-called permanent collection that only very few institutions challenge.

By normalizing the rhythm of exhibitions and building spaces to accommodate that cycle we circumvent the possibilities of how art may come to transform itself in the future. Hence, most of the art we see activates itself towards institutions. This forces us not to register new ideas -that might for example not have an exhibitionary goal, mentally and physically on the peripheries of our practices. In a way, each time an art practice engages in a critique of the institution it is at the same time an attempt to pursue a discussion with a zombie.

The question is twofold; how can practices of the present begin without an exhibition in mind, and how can an expanded model contribute to the presentation and discussion of past work. This is not merely a formal exercise, but a need and a necessity. I doubt otherwise that decolonization of the museum will ever take place. That is to say, exhibitionism and coloniality emerge from the same root, and without ensuring that exhibitions are not at the center of a museum’s activities we cannot imagine the future.

Late-capitalist exhibition models and exhibition practices in late-capitalism are about being present, about presencing in the present. As such, a representative institution of its time cannot be contemporary. By contemporary I subscribe to a notion of dissonance and not to what we may say is “new.” Not to be confused with the process of becoming contemporary, neophilia is more or less a negligible divergence anchored to what is already familiar.

Mere presencing suppresses comprehensive analysis in favor of perfunctory treatments. This reflects an institutionalized condition where there is no possibility for an institution to allow itself to change through the actions it commits to. This is not only due to a lack of time for reflection. The change is seen in the context of a program, which on completion leaves the institution “unchanged,” or it changes back again to its previous ways of working. This schizophrenic condition between an institution’s performance and what it purports to be requires unpacking. It is a schism that marks the abdication of the institution’s responsibility, role and commitment to society. What is an institution other than what it does; its research, publications, exhibitions and public programs? Can it have an “identity” beyond that?

From the end of the 1970s, museums have been subjected to an economic condition of perpetual deprivation. Like healthcare and education, they have not been immunised against the volleys of emerging turbo-capitalism. When money began to shrink in the public realm and accumulate in the hands of a few, museums followed the money. To offset the perils of a decrease in public funds and support, they retorted by both living with the new conditions and largely benefiting from them. Their alternatives, the efficient outposts built from scratch by the elites, the oligarchs, fared even better. I have no intention, as you will see further on, to pitch public and private against each other, and/or assume a moral high ground. To the contrary, the harmony and rapprochement between ownership models tells us a lot about not overplaying this difference.

Panhandling to the elites and autocracies that replaced the traditional broad-based civic and locatable (assigned) class, museums became clumsy neoliberal operations. They became something else, and the kinds of institutions that chose not to dumb down and join the charade were singled out as odd, quirky, temporary experimentations not to be taken so seriously. These loners face the threat of falling off the grid. Because their frames are ever so specific.

Hence, with expanding development teams, experience and management units and asset marketization they turned themselves into representative institutions of their time. They turned their capacities and potentialities into assets to be marketized and brand peddled to secure the present moment. We could claim that they forfeited their future.

Institution’s Time

How can institutional time be reimagined? It is essential to recognize that institutions exist in three different times concurrently. Exhibitions perform in the “present time.” Meanwhile, the institution is a heritage machine bearing and asking questions around unresolved, ignored, absented and obscured stories from the past, and also negotiating, fermenting, testing out, in the best case, possible futures. Museums’ mandates used to be clear: to do everything in their capacity to advocate a better world than the one received. This used to be in The International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) mission statement until recent years. Simply, not making things worse. The “better” is unambiguous. At the most basic level an ecologically maintained world with unobstructed rights to knowledge, common resources, fundamental services like health and education and equality of species including those that do not have a voice of their own. To support, cherish and voice these rights is not becoming political in a narrow sense of the word. It is simple decency. If the clock is ticking for the human species, as some claim, we can delay our demise with dignity.

I used to believe that the museum does not have to take a side, but only present a strong argument to help people make better informed decisions. I am not so sure now; but we can discuss this later.

If institutional time is not the present time, what would be some of the ways to become contemporary? One strategy is to be transparent and opaque simultaneously while keeping these two actions separate. Most amazing contributions to public thinking were fermented, tested, and negotiated away from the threatening gaze of the order, philistines, shared half-truths and populists. This need -in times of an ascendant global fascism- is becoming ever more urgent today. We have to nurture and protect. Hence, an institution is a monastery as much as it is a church. But it cannot be a church looking like a monastery for the cognoscenti or a monastery looking like a church. It can neither be a public space where only privileged voices are echoed, nor a protected space where all ideas are equally worth discussing. These things are to be kept separate from each other. Transparency and opacity overlap only in a performative or an unpredictable condition. This sudden condition of radical empowerment, as we know, can never be lasting. It is more like what Zygmunt Bauman has called a “swarm” when referring to occupy movements, and the Arab Spring.

We work in a trajectory of the past and the future, which means we have multiple publics we are accountable to and need to take care of: The public of the present moment; a public that keeps arriving from an unresolved past, a past that will not go away, that has to be constantly confronted and pushed forward. Lastly, there is a future public which is why we do what we do. So, the institutional public is a plurality that does not privilege the moment and any decision we make in the moment has an effect on all three temporalities, which includes changing the past in the present. As Walter Benjamin had written: “If the past insists, it is because of life’s unavoidable demand to activate in the present, the seeds of its buried futures.” This notion of history and future collapsing into the present moment trumps the classic approaches to the assessment of an institution.

A core issue here is to underscore the notion of the museum situated as a non-capitalist institution embedded in a turbo-capitalist economy. Please note that there is a difference between anti-capitalist and non-capitalist. The first is a political position, while the second a public condition. It was the only condition that was not to be surrendered by the social state or the welfare state. Non-capitalism is about public time, which holds a society together and that turbo-capitalism has helped erode and decimate. The average lifespan of a private company is less than a century, about 75 years, but public time is supposed, or expected to be, more or less infinite. The museum is a three centuries old operation. That makes it older than most countries, economic or political systems.

Management

What does management imply? Management types are brought in to increase operational efficiency and cut costs. We have always relied on the same argument: What do art historians know about running a museum, doctors about running a hospital or professors running a university? Really? However, there has never been a model of “neutral success” that allows better fiscal and operational strategy without a substantive shift in the institution. The managerial approach has given way to at least two generations of directors who may have the proper background in art history but have embraced a different role altogether. Finding a recipe for mere financial success does not make a director great.

Management also means the monetization of certain assets and conversion of other assets to liabilities waiting to be unloaded. Asset analysis leads to increased loan and service fees and ends at times in heedless deaccession. Certain tools of the museum become asset class objects with unaffordably high loan fees taking the less powerful institutions out of the game, hence denying the public of those institutions the possibility of experiencing certain work. Other tools of the museum become liabilities or orphan objects ready to be shipped out or auctioned off to and passed on to the private sphere. They are no longer available as unique insights, testimonials, and indispensable tools to tell stories. The outdated role of the keeper/connoisseur has been replaced by a network of curators entangled in a grid of collectors and dealers

Cutting costs means smaller research and curatorial departments and increased outsourcing and contracted services. That is to say, the core operations of the museum become serviced by third parties and temporary staff. To add one more spin to this scenario is the new workplace culture. Especially rampant in the cultural sphere is that museums are increasingly staffed with itinerant knowledge workers where a sense of belonging is replaced by the notion of one station of a career. Institutional royalty and vice versa is, similar to, business world have changed.

All this opens the way to institutional blunders, bloated development funds and other nonessentials such as reliance on head hunters and consultancy companies.

Institutions have sought strategies to delay their demise through mergers, takeovers (PS1 being taken over by Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)), brand expansion (Guggenheim Model), administrative centralization (Pompidou branches) and streamlining, divestiture of assets (Berkshire Museum) or asset capitalization.

This paradigm shift means simply handing over the institution to contemporary desire, one that privileges the present moment over any other.

We are living, as we all realize, in the ever present. Management rules in a horizon of less than a few years. We are stuck in a present without a direction. As we lose a sense of horizon we get more stuck in the present. As our colleague Manuel Borja-Villel said “we are trapped in a past in which we don’t recognize ourselves and a present we don’t like.” Borja-Villel continues, in a discussion with Charles Esche to say that the situation “promised an illusory life” in the “infinite present” and changed the way “humans perceive themselves and their position in relation to each other and to time.” You can also call it “post-history” if you prefer. Post-history emerged at the end of the 1980s and ushered in an era of no conflict after the fall of bureau communism, followed by deregulations and a chipping away of the welfare state.

There are ever fewer reasons to be cheerful about the world we inhabit, with less than half a century left for our species that sees every other living or inert being in subordination as a form of resource or waste, a massive deterioration of income balance and normalization of institutional and societal corruption. In such an accelerated present it should come as no surprise that we can conceive the realm of institutions as part of the problem. We are part of the problem. It does not help at all when MoMA puts up a show of paintings by Muslim artists in response to Donald Trump’s travel ban. It is a public relations gimmick, and does not change the fact that MoMA is funded by oligarchs and that its programs have not at any level questioned what brought us here.

Institutions offer neither a sustained criticality nor a counterpoint. Whether we can restore them to a historical position without the colonial/imperial baggage of their own past is a fair question, but even then, the institution's role is limited to more one of restoration than transformation. The limits of its commitment (to this responsibility) is to be recognized as well. Another point to discuss.

Who are we loyal to? Who do we care about? Who do we talk to? Who do we talk with? What is the world we want to live in while knowing the impossibility of reaching it. Lines of loyalty have to be realigned, so as to address not the tribal and self-serving interests of those who act in the name of the museum and to not simply get bogged down by the public private dichotomy.

Deeply problematic within the institutional sphere is that museums are neither on the side of the artists nor do they seem to be there for public interest, and there is a sharp contrast between their jargons and their actions. While this discussion has to be parsed further to bring an end to the public private dichotomy and understand better what it means to have tribalized/ privatized interests. To place the burden on ”privatization’’ is correct. However this situation impacts equally public and private. Public or private funding, both are in effect privatized interests of a representational system.

There is a sense of helplessness, where institutional actors are uneasy with this situation. But at the same time they are unwilling to draw conclusions from the experiences they are subjected to and they do not investigate why they perhaps cannot claim their historical position. There are not only the vested interests at stake, but also the institution’s imperative is to survive. Surviving in this case is not a particularly commendable act as it is not linked to a capacity that needs to be protected or nourished. The question is not whether we need institutions but what kind of institutions we need. Worse, the level of cynicism, the sense of resignation and lack of imagination has become pandemic.

Is it possible for cultural institutions working within contexts of real estate expansion, privatized interest, and cultural and proprietary rights to respond to the times? I am not speaking of knee-jerk reactions to daily politics or assuming a pseudo-lefty, humanist position of the classical art world. We are no longer dealing with specific signs, but with a global situation.

It is essential then to resist the spectacular, the privatization and theme-parkisation of social life, and turn our compass to a democratic project. As Chantal Mouffe has suggested, our larger objective is transforming institutions “into a terrain of contestation of the hegemonic order.”1 But this is only half-right. The order can hardly be located, it is embedded and without decolonization -hence the contestation of our own positions- not much will actually change. What we can do at best is to develop positions where we can be ready for change.

The museum world has been increasingly embedded in a network of relationships that preclude public purview. That is to say, it has become a pre-public (or post-public) realm with dispositions and residues presented for plebian consumption. While the outputs appear to be similar, the processes through which decisions are being taken have been privatized in a self-affirming global network of private and public contexts alike.

Looking at it from another angle, private or public initiative is not the question as long as the overwhelming concept is about a passive receiver, an audience, a viewer or a visitor that lacks the capacity, tools and agency to articulate its desire. This power-based lack of communication between the institution and its outside needs rethinking. What remains outside does not have a place for its desires to be recognized. Seamless spaces are offered between the “customer” and the “provider” in a charade of market-tested exhibitions as the possible public is extracted from the equation and replaced by processes of managerial quantification.

In more than one way, it seems that we have switched models along route and not fully realized it. Between the museum ideals of the late 18th century and late 20th century fundamental shifts have taken place. But, it is not a time we can or need to go back to. In fact, the model of the institution that has appeared in the last four decades is in alignment with the diegesis of the originating narratives of the industrial fair and theme park. Specifically, it follows the theme parks’ reincarnation after the Second World War, which was made secure and safe for middle-class families as a form of clean, branded tourism answering to all of one’s needs from shopping, restaurants and kids entertainment.

I was listening to an interview with Tom Krens recently. I was dumbstruck by his valorization of the “theme park” as a viable example for the museum world. It seems I was correct in my conjectures regarding the double legacy of museum practice as residing not in the history of the museum but in the theme park and the industrial fair. This decoupling from the museum heritage model was precisely the point.

Many of the big player institutions in major cities have already accommodated aspects of this double legacy. They act as consumer heaven and leisure time producers, forecasting a tourist class that keeps on swelling with the incorporation of new audiences from India, China, sub-Sahara, the Gulf and South East Asia. In parallel, the citizens being catered to have also been “downgraded” to a generic tourist class. This is of course not all that these institutions do, and an institution is never “one” thing. But it is apt to bear in mind that certain empire institutions have become stronger through relationships they have entered into with the “rest” of the world, which only three decades ago were contexts framed outside (their) historical time.

The transformation is coupled with what I call “powerless socialization.“ This is an experience that has all aspects of a notion of publicum, which is then reduced to an experience such as congregation in the new agora, by their own volition as part of their role on the design of the space. However, the public participation in such spaces is about a managed inclusivity. That people congregate and get together in these spaces can hardly ever evolve into anything constructive. Despite lofty declarations that speak of museum atriums holding political potential, these are not the places of the beginning of a new democracy, they will not become potential agoras or places of mobilization. They will not offer the tools towards self-determination. In “powerless socialization“ there is hardly anything that connects the “audiences” by way of necessity.

Mostly, the museum has become a pleasure space. It often summons a tour de force architecture. The exhibition experience is reduced today to the visitation of new sacrosanct edifices of “starchitects.” This sacral experience is not about the actualisation of a bona fide civil society. It in fact hinders such an attempt, and reduces the potential of activating culture’s capacity in helping shape a society.

But it is instantaneously branded for what it is. It is a place coextensive with the leisure and tourism sector. Consumer exposure is sublimated with brand recognition. Such a model, in order to survive, requires nonstop real-estate expansion and construction. Otherwise, it will collapse. Like most things in the late-capitalist economy, the exhaustion is part of the script. Death is premeditated, inevitable and purpose-built. Hence, when you see museum expansions in cities and power corridors like Hong Kong, New York, Moscow, and Berlin, do not be surprised. Expansion is about survival; expansion is also a recognition of an end and this is not a paradox. In fact, this model does not embody a single paradox. What we often see is the reticulation of the same artist and architect names, works mostly indistinguishable from each other, from one institution to another, and narrative hierarchies must be more or less accommodating of each other. They must look like each other in a grid of compatibility to suppress the absurdity of the whole enterprise.

Meanwhile, museums outside brand cities keep on unravelling. A dire script has been in front of them for the longest time. Their locatable, historical support-class has dissolved and so has the the civic sector. The “new support class” knows only of the vertical order; it is not grounded, it is unhinged from time and space and often looks only to London, New York, Los Angeles and other power corridors and will park its stock of “talents” wherever it desires. I mean “park” because it refuses to respect historical norms. Park, because it literally parks in terms of long-term loans often protected by hard contracts. This is so unlike the horizontal and distributed support classes of the past! That is to say, there is a difference between a civic membership at twenty dollars a year of 10,000 people versus one person giving 2,000,000. Guess who has the power now? What takes more work to raise? And what do you have to do to make that person give again?

It did not take a genius to forecast such a historical transformation as second cities began to spin into a crisis over a decade and a half ago. It was nevertheless too hard to surrender to the inevitable for any subject born into a welfare state. They believed that the hell we live in today was momentary, that it would pass. So, instead of introducing and testing out different methods for their institutions, many institutions preferred to remain obstinate to the challenges, effectively subjecting themselves to increasingly anemic conditions and even insolvency.

At the same time the administration of the museums began to change. When managers begin to administer institutions as if they were companies, just like hospitals or universities, they became increasingly subjected to a managerial logic. As the curator and former museum director David Elliott has remarked, “Management has become elevated as a skill in itself that has no relation to any particular discipline or knowledge.”

Unfortunately, to expand on what I said before, most of the managerial reconditioning ends up in an ingest of more of the poison that got them sick in the first place. The point is not simply the survival of an institution, that is not the question, surviving is neither important nor essential. It is about rethinking the institution’s promise and keeping it germane through changing times. A survivalist attitude without a core mission makes the institution more vulnerable to tribal interests. Tribal interests are in the business of leverage. Why do we live? Why does anything live and is there a dignified resignation?

Short-term panacea could be tantamount to turning museums into zombie institutions. In short, when museums with a public service mandate enter, as non-capitalist institutions, in the late-capitalist economy, they enter a field in which they have no public endorsement and have to abide by the protocols of instant assessment, short-term efficiency and becoming the servants of the moment in which they operate. These institutions are zombies because they do not know they are dead.

The kernel of the problem lies in the tension between contrasting economic models and the way historical public institutions and contemporary capitalism have completely different ideas of what public good constitutes.

The museum world has been increasingly encircling power corridors. Power corridors are the kind of spaces where energy and arms markets crystallize, with financial markets forming the outer shell.

Places and institutions that do not fall in the category of the spectacular, places that are below the network radar, get phased out of the presiding narratives. Medium‐scale institutions keep on disappearing like institutions in the second cities. “art centers,” “ICAs,” “kunstvereins” have less traction than before. The “middle” keeps on dropping out because of an increasing market demand for large‐scale institutions.

Smaller operations are not octopoid in reach, they are not tooled to accommodate branded projects or complex sponsorship schemes. The middle continues to evaporate, or it is forced to scale up under intensely privatized and competitive cultural spheres. It also drops off because sponsorship is furtively directed to institutions with brand value. In short, as in economy, money concentrates in the hands of the few, the middle is disappearing and the small is destitute. Finally there is the itinerant subject of the precarious knowledge worker (and even institutions) that accept these protocols and try to stay ahead of the tide until they burn out.

We know that the museum is not what it used to be, and has not in general developed into a system of rewarding frameworks. There are still too few institutions that do not merely act as the acquiescent platforms of their time. No longer the eternal institution on par with the church and the city hall on a public square, the last 35 years has seen more than a measured transformation. The public and the museum of 250 plus years have been descaled as part of an epistemic shift.

It is both harder and easier to institute in these times, understanding that the normative blueprint has become inoperative. A cardinal rule for a new institution would be incorporating and welcoming contradictions and failures; another is to develop a culture that looks at things from different disciplines, and incorporates academic discourse that is open to the public.

The task is to address visitors who are not ready, captive audiences and who are certainly and rightfully doubtful of museums in which there are often no narratives that incorporate them, or in which they find themselves forced to over-identify. To do this it is necessary to welcome new tools that enable the public imaginary to flow into and eventually help transform institutions from within.

The task is also to denaturalize the institution’s presumed authority, or at least accept that it is only a presumption to be reasoned and disputed. It is essential to not simply utilize but to invent new tools and agencies that release the burden of being location specific, that open and make clear controlling influences that affect institutional transparency, and that do not use the language of the royal plural.

In short, if the institution can no longer be public because of its bylaws, how does it become public? The point is not to interpret the world and present it as a kind of “commodity” but to be in it and accept the consequences of a complex co-location.

In the 20th century, there were times when museums were able to dispute the systems that supported them but they were at the same time tied to them. This correlation was recognized as the role of culture and its institutions as a functioning stratum within civic, democratic projects. The question for today is how production, mediation and dissemination can be (re)democratized and what effects would that have on our museums? Would such a dispositive propel us to rethink the institution’s role in society?

SALT

I do not think the work we pursue at SALT is unorthodox. It is in fact deeply rooted in history and institutionality. Our imperative was not to be novel, radical or cutting edge. In fact these feel more like formalism. We actively attempt to cushion the impact of a vociferous market and disregard most of what seems to be “in” or what is acknowledged as “exceptional” and peddled to a “kitsch cognition.” I always claimed that we program for people who are more intelligent than us, because we do not believe people are simple-minded. They do not want to be infantilized. Given the tools our users are amazingly crafty in making collective decisions and would likely claim that other institutions’ attitudes to their audiences are often preachy. When we begin a project we exercise what we call “a state of unknowing.” This is not to say we are deferring to a cute 2.0. museum philosophy in full accord with the business of cozy collectivity, creative economy and the like. For SALT, the idea is to enter an agonistic sphere where difficult questions can be posed without being considered incriminating or hostile.

SALT is not an artwork collection-based institution. Hence there is the considerable luxury of looking at objects without their routine handicaps. Focusing upon research and treating what we work with as potentially discursive objects, SALT becomes more involved in actualisation of said objects’ capacity. As such, the question is not about custodianship but shaping novel narratives and, telling multiple histories of art. There is never one story. History is not fixed, and any attempt to invent a canon is delusional or authoritarian or both delusional and authoritarian.

In continuum with the treatment of objects and things, SALT has from its very beginnings disengaged from the curatorial. We do not have curatorial positions because the way we work acknowledges the curatorial figure neither as an “auteur class” nor a classical keeper. SALT’s dispositive is to visualise research in what we have been calling a post-curatorial approach where different subjectivities, from the professional, academic or purely curious and interested, are assembled around a project. The result does not quite look the same but more importantly, how we get to conceive a project is different.

We questioned the standard departmentalized, compartmentalized master plans of museums from the very beginning. As György Kepes had written “Ignorance, inertia, but mostly fear that we may be forced to give up vested interests has kept us from pooling our knowledge.” Dismantling the obtuse results of departmental arrogance was a place to start, and it is not only semantics. We actively engage with art and other things from non-discipline-limited angles and attempt to make informed decisions based on rigorous, independent, and open research. If you cannot link your work with a prerogative of thinking beyond the purely monographic, chronological, medium-bound, similar approaches, you cannot proactively create different frameworks. Without these frameworks we cannot invent models that are faithful to art and its practices. We have to be open to incorporating contradictions into our discussions, as there is nothing less stimulating than non-striated, smooth spaces. Diversity and being open about your lack of competency in any interdisciplinary practice is a sine qua non.

If compartmentalization was a bad idea to start with, it has become entrenched with an obtusely arrogant professional jargon over many decades. While non‐medium‐specific departments have been no‐brainers for a very long time, the anxiety is real. Some institutions introduce inter‐curatorial positions, others offer stopgap measures but at the end, departmentalization is bound to disappear.

In short, SALT provides a unique climate where different sets of knowledge clash and benefit from each other without any arrogance. I believe that the desire to build a “museum” in the 21st century stems from self-doubt, it may be an arriviste concept, it may be self-orientalizing, and it is certainly not very original. It is somewhat unfortunate that most people working in non-Western contexts choose to emulate Western models of the museum. To pursue a model that has been invented years before, that is translated without a stipulation for a new social and cultural context is to say the least, odd. It seems that this condition of coloniality has outlived colonialism.

We decided to not grow in an evolutionary manner. We did not follow an industrial, evolutionary model. Instead, we redefined for our case an institution for the 21st century by not trying to repeat the mistakes of the past. What kind of people do we want to grow with? How do we shape a reality? Hence, incrementalism was not allowed. A colleague made a great remark in an interview in 2009 during our expert discussions that perhaps articulate what I am trying say best. Markus Novak said: “You can look at evolution as fitness. Which is the sort of an industrial way of understanding it... Or you can look at it as diversity… And it’s much more interesting to figure out a mechanism for producing diversity which requires the fostering of mutations… They can be applied culturally to the functioning of an institution or to the content of what is shown and what is curated for the purpose of not fixing categories, but constantly producing new ones, trusting that the rest of culture will take care of fixating it.” Novak’s metaphors about the evolutionary and industrial model could be taken as a kind of trying to achieve a “limited excellence.” That is to say that in places with unremarkable thresholds, there is pretty much nothing that cannot be anticipated.

From our very beginnings we have been thinking of the concepts of users, communities of interest, professionalized audiences, constituencies as opposed to terms such as audience, customer or visitors. Not that all cannot exist concurrently within an institution, but we cannot be a different thing for each person or group. Unfortunately, we do not have tools that enable our visitors, but we believe in opening a space in which they can be invented. SALT is slowly morphing from a “broadcast institution” to something that develops intelligence with its users, a collective intelligence if you will. For the “audience” to become embedded and active, one needs many organic interfaces that are built with trust and care in mind. Our question is the following: What are the strategies for establishing ethical and non‐hegemonic agencies and agonistic conviviality?

Our benchmark has not been mass media, or the head-count, and certainly not the occult methods of data aggregation. We are interested in genuine reactions, and how our projects are translated into curricula in universities; how content and information can move people out of their slumber to look at the world differently and work differently. We like to assist people in developing goals that allow them to become more hopeful, more intrigued and more prone to making informed decisions; and we like to do this without being preachy or talking down while in engagement. We did not have a hegemonic desire to address each and every unprivileged person or group, or to employ military terminology like “target” audiences. What SALT instead does is engage in discussions and platforms for debate that reach beyond the traditional support basis. Perhaps, with the hope that engagement with different segments of society will turn some into constituencies and consuls and translators in their communities. There has been a developing taxonomy of “embedded institutions” within SALT, collaborations, hosting and simply space allocation. At different levels of visibility these institutions could be working groups released from the university due to their politics that do not align with the government, as well as NGOs, documentary film festivals, performance groups, human rights and LGBTQ associations. Hence, the cultural, social and civic education is realized in the wider perspective. Can we benchmark that?

A critic had written on SALT that it “attempts to realize the kind of multidisciplinary, research-based practice that normally individual artists, collectives and short-lived art centers have been able to pursue.” I appreciated this note as it spoke to one of our goals of thinking of the institution as a flotilla of individual boats rather than a mothership. SALT is shaped by this multiplicity of experiments and ideas, its failures and relative successes. There is an artistic culture that permeates the place without having always to deal with art. The questions we started with in 2007 and opened with in 2011 may at some level be history now. However, to put things in perspective, some of our questions were: what should a future institution look like? Can we scale up without yielding to fame and populist blockbusters, and can we retain agility? We did not want to run SALT in a centralized manner. The guiding ideas, the motivation, the spirit and the collaboration should be close to each other, but they shouldn't be run from one place. We thought about a certain “ecology of things.” For instance, how to have a physical wall system that does not require repaints and constant waste production for each project. SALT is a debranded institution and uses forms of communication that do not need the mainstream media. Because we seek a true interdisciplinary dialogue, the absence of a more pristine commercial gallery-like environment has allowed us to open the field and understand our buildings as tools. It is all about stimulating curiosity and curiosity is not disciplined. At SALT we prefer artists, exhibitions and graphic designers, or really anyone or thing involved in our projects, to enter into a relationship with the context that is based more on process and less on the objects to be displayed. It is not something that we plan in anticipation, but I would say it is a side effect of the relationships we establish with all our collaborators. The architecture of the buildings is also a case in point -we worked with eight different younger architectural groups from Turkey under the umbrella of one main architect to coordinate the right ecology for each function, and to foster new design concepts.

When we complete a project it remains problematic. We expand the time frame of its existence with post-programs, we release publications months or sometimes years after it has finished. We also serialised certain exhibitions, one of which was structured in the form of “modern essays,” or we would establish year-long exhibition series as if they are radio-plays, in these ways we would go at issues again and again from different angles. All this was done not in a grand sense of historical correction but to produce prototypes for subjectivities, hoping that the rest of culture takes care of it, uses them, plays with them, and develops them. This is in accordance with our political position that art and consequently exhibitions are not for everybody; we are not for the masses. That is to say we cannot be interested in an entity that has no shape, can neither be abstracted nor voiced. But we are extremely interested in anybody who we can enter into a discursive, agonistic, supportive discussion with.

Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum Revisited,” Artforum, 2010, p. 326↩

[bristolunifriendsofpalestin-blog]

Epigram Interview with Bristol FoP

In November 2016, Bristol’s student newspaper Epigram spoke to Bristol FoP committee member Alfred Davies. We are publishing this interview in its entirety as a reference point for Bristol FoP’s stance on various issues, particularly the BDS movement. 

1) You say in your statement that you intend to boycott future IPDG events, a move that they have criticised. Why will you boycott future events? Our society aims at raising awareness at the University of Bristol about Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, and campaigning for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return of Palestinian refugees. We do not oppose dialogue per se, but believe that unless the fundamentally colonial context of the situation in Palestine is acknowledged, then the kind of “dialogue” promoted by IPDG only serves to perpetuate the view that this is just another conflict, and that the power to create peace on each side is equal.

A just and lasting peace can only be achieved when Israel’s system of settler colonialism, apartheid, and military occupation is dismantled. By inviting Mark Regev, a senior representative of the Israeli government who has consistently defended Israeli human rights violations for many years, IPDG are lending legitimacy to Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, and that is something that our society cannot accept.

2)  What actions are Bristol FoP taking in the BDS movement? What about Palestinian solidarity student groups in the UK more generally? Since the launch of the BDS movement in 2005, the BDS call has been enthusiastically embraced by student groups across the UK. More than 30 UK student unions have now passed motions in support of BDS campaigns, and the NUS has adopted BDS as official policy. In the last week alone, students at Goldsmiths and City University in London have passed new motions in support of BDS. And the growing strength of the BDS movement in the UK is already having a clear impact.

Over the past five years, thanks to the actions of student groups, multiple UK universities have been pressured to cancel contracts worth millions of pounds with companies such as security giant G4S and French multinational Veolia which are deeply complicit in Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism, and both of these companies have now stated they are withdrawing from the Israeli market.

Bristol Friends of Palestine is committed to being a part of a movement that supports Palestinians and seeks justice and peace for all people in the region. The situation at present is dire, with Palestinians forced to live in some of the most inhumane conditions imaginable. We have plans to hold public events to let our fellow students know about the situation in Palestine to encourage them to join the campaign. We are also planning to organise events as part of Israeli Apartheid Week next year.

3)  How important do you think it is to encourage university institutions to boycott? Academic institutions in the UK contribute to the problems we have in the region. There are extensive collaborative research programmes between Israeli universities and those in the UK. For example, there is partnership between UoB and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, which in part consists of collaborative research into cyber security. Given Israel’s human rights record, and their willingness to use the internet to undermine individual security and privacy, we should be very concerned about this relationship. This is particularly so given the close working relationship between Israel’s universities and its security sector.

Another key aspect is pressuring universities to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians, such as HP, who provide technology for the biometric ID cards use to restrict Palestinians’ movement, and for Israeli naval forces, who are key in maintaining the blockade on Gaza.

4)  What was the result of the motion that passed last year to boycott Occupation goods? Has any action been taken?

No specific action has yet been taken as a result of last year’s motion, which targeted Israel’s illegal settlements. These settlements are enormous cities that rob Palestinians of their land, their natural resources and their livelihoods. They are widely condemned internationally as illegal and a barrier to peace, including by our own Government, so it is wonderful that our union has adopted such a policy. We are discussing what steps need to be taken to ensure the policy is implemented properly.

We are hoping to also build on this and to initiate a debate amongst students about the other measures we can take as a union. For example, there is a sense that only targeting Israel’s settlements is futile if the UK - and our unions - continue to allow trade with the rest of Israel. During last year’s debate it was clear that many students were supportive of a wider boycott and I think this is something that students here at Bristol should be discussing.

5)  The NUS voted last year to boycott Israeli goods, but following this the president accepted a sponsorship from Coca-Cola, who operate illegally on occupied territories. Do you feel that the NUS is making progress in terms of the BDS movement?

The NUS is a national body that represents millions of students, so it is natural that there are a plurality of views on the situation in Palestine and on whether boycotts are an effective tool for advancing justice and peace. Over the past years, the NUS has adopted divestment policies designed to ensure that the union does not contribute to fuelling the conflict or the oppression of Palestinians. These policies represent the views of a large number of students and are reflective of dozens of campaigns in campuses around the country. Indeed, boycott motions have been passed at a large number of student unions. Students feel strongly about the suffering of the Palestinians and it is right that students should ask their national union to advocate for them on this important topic. Boycott motions have also been discussed and passed at a number of other UK unions, amongst them the UCU and the TUC.

That NUS has such a policy is itself progress, and more work can be done to ensure that it is implemented throughout the organisation. I understand that a mistake was made regarding Coca-Cola’s endorsement of an NUS event, with most of the NUS’s elected representatives refusing to attend the event. The matter was dealt with internally by the NUS to ensure that future events and activities remain inline with the organisation’s policy.

There is no doubt that global calls for challenging Israel’s impunity through economic pressure have grown considerably over the past 10 years. As well as unions – innumerable church groups, political parties, local councils, banks and international dignitaries have supported full or partial boycotts of Israel to bring them in line with international law. The NUS’s own policy is small but significant and will contribute to the growing sentiment in Britain which supports the human rights of Palestinians.

6)  New president Malia Bouattia has been criticised as anti-Semitic in her capacity as a Palestinian rights activist. Do you think Jewish students feel victimised by BDS action, and is the BDS movement taking any action on this? How would you respond to accusations that Israel is being unfairly singled out?

I think this question is a really important one. The BDS movement is a struggle against the actions of a state, not against those who identify with a certain religion. It is so important not to conflate the two, and BDS campaigning that is carried out on campus must be done so in a way that is respectful of all students, like our campaigns in Bristol. BDS campaigners in Bristol are proactive in denouncing and looking out for any kind of hate crime, including antisemitism, and vocal in doing so. This is a struggle for Palestinian human rights, not against any group of students. Jewish students have a long tradition of political engagement at all levels of the student movement, and all measures must be taken to ensure that the NUS remains a place where they feel they can express themselves politically.

There is no place for racism whatsoever and our communities, now more than ever, must stand together to ensure that we reject divisiveness and discrimination. Part of our togetherness is in finding healthy ways of disagreeing within our union. If a student or group of students feel that they are not represented on a certain issue, they should engage with their union and campaign for the issues they care about. Sometimes their perspective prevails, other times it does not, but this is the nature of working in a democratic union. If students feel strongly that the NUS’s current policy does not represent their view they can continue to put forward their arguments in the NUS’s democratic bodies.

I do not share the view that Israel is being unfairly singled out. In fact, the opposite is true. There are very few states in the world that have been shown such levels of unfailing support despite consistent violations of international law. Israel benefits considerably from its global connections, particularly its relationship with the US, the EU and the UK. The economic benefit that Israel accrues enables it to enact its illegal policies in Palestine. In that sense, it is the UK (amongst others) that is providing Israel with the material capabilities to continue the oppression of Palestinians. Those advocating boycott are saying that the UK should not be providing Israel with the means to continue these brutal actions.

Epigram article: http://epigram.org.uk/news/2016/11/israeli-ambassador-appearance-inspires-fresh-boycott-action