Speaker: Ian Dunlop: Chairman, Safe Climate Australia; Deputy Convenor, Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil; and Member of The Club of Rome.

The peaking of global oil supply has either happened already, or is about to occur. It was a major trigger of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, and is playing a critical role in the next stage of the crisis, currently unfolding. It is likely be the issue which forces real action on climate change and sets the world on a path to genuine global sustainability, for our current way-of-life is patently unsustainable.

Ian Dunlop has wide experience in energy resources, infrastructure, and international business and was for many years on the staff of Royal Dutch Shell. He chaired the Australian Coal Association (1987-88) and the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading (1998-2000). From 1997 to 2001 he was CEO of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. He is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and the Energy Institute (UK).

Ian is currently Chairman of Safe Climate Australia, Deputy Convenor of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil, a Director of Australia 21, a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development and a Member of The Club of Rome.

Bookings not required. $5 entry at the door.  Refreshments available.

Academics and intellectuals as always can play an important role in fostering the growth of such a non-violent movement within civil society. It is in this spirit that we call for a boycott of research and cultural links with Israel. We urge our colleagues not to attend conferences in Israel; to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linkage arrangements; and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information. We note that while some academics and intellectuals in Israel oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli/Palestinian research projects, the vast majority have either supported the Israeli Army onslaught on the Palestinians, or failed to voice any significant protest against it. The boycott we propose will inevitably also adversely affect those who don’t deserve it, and we regret that this has to happen. We ask our Israeli colleagues and friends to bear with us in solidarity. They know as well as we do that what they will endure because of these boycotts is minimal compared to what the Palestinian people and their academics continue to endure. As with boycotts against apartheid South Africa, urgent international action is now required to stop the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people.

Signatories to Boycott Israel Letter (please note that all signatories are signing in a personal capacity; institutional affiliations are given only for identification purposes).

Ghassan Hage, University of Sydney

John Docker, Australian National University

Stephen Muecke, University of Technology, Sydney

Craig Reynolds, Australian National University

Ann Curthoys, Australian National University

Eva Sallis, University of Adelaide

Ray Jureidini, Monash University (currently American Univ. of Beirut)

Ian Watson, University of Sydney

Ien Ang, University of Western Sydney

Jill Julius Matthews, Australian National University

George Morgan, University of Western Sydney

Neil Maclean, University of Sydney

Debjani Ganguly, Australian National University

Graeme Nyberg, LaTrobe University

David Carter, University of Queensland

P.N. (Raja) Junankar, University of Western Sydney

Robyn Moroney, University of Western Sydney

David Wright, University of Western Sydney

Nectarios Costadopoulos, University of Western Sydney

Frances de Groen, University of Western Sydney

Therese Davis, University of Newcastle

Phil Andrews, Monash University

Glenn McConell, Monash University

Stuart Bunt, UWA

Felicity Jensz, Universtiy of Melbourne

Mike Clear, University of Western Sydney

A.G. Khan, University of Western Sydney

Livio Dobrez, Australian National University

Jeannie Martin, University of Technology, Sydney

Glenn Moloney, University of Melbourne

Ray Markey, University of Wollongong

Jock Collins, University of Technology, Sydney

Sebastian Job, University of Sydney

Carol Reid, University of Western Sydney

Taimor Hazou, University of Melbourne

Ned Curthoys, Australian National University

Liz Reed, Monash University

Brett Neilson, University of Western Sydney

Georgine Clarsen, Australian National University

Marsha Rosengarten, University of New South Wales

Marta Romer, University of New South Wales

Helen Macallan, University of Newcastle

Paula Gonzalez, University of Sydney

Bronwen Phillips, University of New South Wales

Meaghan MorrisLingnan, University, Hong Kong

Jane Lydon, LaTrobe University

Glenn Humphreys, University of Western Sydney

Ali Farhat, University of Sydney

Roger Markwick, University of Newcastle

Christopher Forth, Australian National University

Frances Parker, University of Western Sydney

Ibtisam Abu-Duhou, University of Melbourne

Peter Johnston, RMIT

Desley Deacon, Australian National University

Richard Baker, Australian National University

Noel McEwan, LaTrobe university

Lesley Sayer, LaTrobe University

Gerry Gill, LaTrobe University

Lyndall Ryan, University of Newcastle

Sue Gillett, LaTrobe University

Anna Haebich, Griffith University

Subhash Jaireth, Independent Scholar, Canberra

Edward Scheer, University of New South Wales

Michael Mawal, RMIT

John Castles, Independent Scholar, Canberra

Ian Maxwell, University of Sydney

Sara Wills, University of Melbourne

Karen Gai, Dean University of Ballarat

Christine Maher, LaTrobe University

J.L.Harland, RMIT

Bill Deller, LaTrobe University

Bashir Sumar, University of Western Sydney

Paul Tabar, Notre Dame University, Beirut & UWS

Rosemary Webb, University of Canberra

Laleen Jayamanne, University of Sydney

James McArdle, LaTrobe University

Terry Irving, University of Sydney

Ann Genovese, University of Technology, Sydney

Erik Eklund, University of Newcastle

Jeremy Smith, University of Ballarat

Anne Rutherford, University of Western Sydney

George Kouvaros, University of NSW

Stephanie Tarbin, Australian National University

Charles Livingstone, LaTrobe University

Lew Zipin, University of Canberra

Hana Adra, University Of Western Sydney

Trevor Batrouney, RMIT

Bill Adra, University of Western Sydney

Scott Poynting, University of Western Sydney

Jeremy Beckett, Sydney University

David Lemmings, University of Newcastle

Parviz Doulai, University of Wollongong

Peter Vial, University of Wollongong

Caroline Alcorso, University of Sydney

No Logo author Naomi Klein recently visited Australia, which brought her book to the attention of the mainstream media and the celebrity-making machine. Klein resisted this, but described the book’s success as an activist tool.

One Spring night in 1993 a teenager spoke to the Victorian Trades Hall Council and reduced the worldly union officials to tears. Speaking through an interpreter, Tumthong Pohirun described the experience of jumping from the third floor window of a burning factory on to the dead and dying bodies of her friends in a desperate attempt to survive. Her burns were severe, but healed. The emotional and psychological pain of seeing her friends burn would still hurt. Tumthong was a worker at the Kader toy factory in Thailand, which is notable, not because of the appalling pay and working conditions, but because the deadly fire which killed 188 workers actually made the news in the countries where the toys were sold.

In No Logo, Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein asks why the dreadful story of the Kader fire did not ignite the anti-corporate/anti-globalisation movement that is now becoming so angry and visible. Tumthong was in Australia to participate in an international conference organised by Australia Asia Workers Links, where Australian unionists and activists compared experiences and worked on campaigns with labour activists from independent labour organisations from around the Asian and Pacific region. AAWL was founded back in the 1970s when globalisation was taking off — as transnationals and Australian companies started moving offshore seeking cheaper costs. Since that time, they, like other labour activist groups have sought to educate, connect and build solidarity between Australian unions and emerging labour organisations in the region.

No Logo tells the story of job flight and what that has meant for First and Third World workers. Klein persuasively argues that there is good reason and a certain synchronicity for the growing solidarity (although she steers clear of such old-fashioned terminology) between the young Western casual retail workers and the young factory workers of Asia and South America who make the products that carry the sought-after labels. They are young, they are exploited, they have no power, they are manipulated by advertising and they are not filled with hope that one day they will be rich and happy. Klein paints a picture of a new generation enraged by the power of the big corporations to control their bodies and minds, dismissive of the capacities of governments and of old social movements to change anything.

Long-term activists who participated in the recent Australian M1 and S11 actions were no doubt gladdened, if a little bemused, by a new generation who had just discovered that the clothes they wear and the toys they play with are made in ghastly conditions by workers paid less a day than they spend on a cup of coffee.

Klein doesn’t quite have the answer to the question of ‘Why now?’ Why did the Kader story die away a few years ago, yet now the stories are being heard and acted upon? Her own research does, however, answer the question in many ways. As with all social movements, the growing anti-corporate mobilisation is the coming together of many related things. All that research and campaigning work by labour, environmental, feminist and human rights groups have enabled coherent critiques of complex free trade constructions like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). The globalisation of capitalist production, distribution and exchange spurred on by communications and transport technologies was clearly not in itself enough. The meaning of the glaring statistics about transnationals that had budgets greater than some nation states and control the majority of world trade did not capture the popular imagination.

Klein suggests that if the media reports of the Kader fire had shown the toys being made by the workers, it could have made a difference. The delegates at the Trades Hall in Melbourne were shown the Bart Simpson doll, and that did help bring the story home. Not surprisingly the television story of Kader steered clear of such uncomfortable images that clashed with the interests of the Christmas advertisers. Klein argues that a change came about in the mid nineties:

What happened in 1995 was a kind of collective ‘click’ on the parts of both the media and the public. The cumulative response to the horror stories of Chinese prison labour … has been a noticeable shift in how people in the West see workers in the developing world. ‘’They’re getting our jobs’ is giving way to a more humane reaction: ‘Our corporations are stealing their lives’ …

Whilst Klein can tend to hyperbole, anyone witnessing the assorted causes that have come together for S11 and overseas equivalents, does have to agree that a collective ‘click’ has happened.

Australian activists, though, would be very doubtful about the extent of mass media convergence. However, the mass media is also being challenged by the efficacy of the internet and email in facilitating rapid and coordinated actions, enabling research and analysis that is not all one way — from the West to the rest. The role of the internet, though, can be overplayed, and some caution is needed. It needs to be remembered that what is also easier today is to travel quickly and relatively inexpensively around the world. Add to this the dominance of the English language and familiarity with Western culture, and communication is pretty easy. Western cultural and economic hegemony is indeed enabling the organisation of global anti-globalisation.

It is upon these marvellous contradictions that Klein focuses her analysis as she weaves together her themes of No Space, No Choice, No Jobs and No Logo. The change for Klein is in resistance to the omnipresence of branding, of resistance to the ‘quest to turn brands into media providers, arts producers, town squares and social philosophers — transformed into something, much more invasive and profound’.

‘No Space’ is a chilling account of how ‘branding’ has worked to take old fashioned advertising into the stratosphere. Whereas the old cigarette ads suggested glamorous lifestyles came with their products, contemporary corporate branding has almost left the producers behind. Not surprisingly Nike is a favourite example, and as a market leader it does epitomise the phenomenon. Producing shoes is now a tiny part of Nike’s business and is done by overseas sub-contractors far from Seattle. Nike’s big investments are in advertising, promotions, celebrity sponsorships and more and bigger lifestyle stores, not sports shops. The swoosh, according to Klein, is invidious. She claims to have met Nike retail employees that have it tattooed on their bodies. They didn’t have to — and they certainly have no need to feel company loyalty, as they are casual, readily dispensable workers.

Klein is particularly vehement about the ‘cool hunters’, who go around stealing sub-cultures. It is they who got young urban black American men who walked and talked a certain way to wear their clothes and shoes, even to sing about the products — and then sold the concept so well that now we have middle-class white kids slouching around trying to be cool, black dudes (and failing miserably). Meanwhile, kids are beating others up to steal their runners and parents are working extra shifts to pay for the must-have clothes for their kids. The appropriation of sub-cultures is not new. It just happens faster. It must be hell trying to be a rebellious teenager these days and not find your street smarts copied in a shop window or being worn by the likes of Celine Dion.

It is not only Nike though. Klein has much to tell about those old hands at selling fantasy lifestyles, Coca-Cola and Disney. There are other new players who came into their own in the nineties — Borders swallowing up bookshops, Wal-Mart consuming the small town high street and so on. The Starbucks story got to me. As I was reading about them buying up the coffee shops of North America, I heard that they are about to set up in Melbourne. Then I left the television on after the end of Star Trek one night and heard David Letterman tell a joke about the ubiquitous Starbucks. Next day I see a Simpsons re-run with a running gag of empty shops with ‘Starbucks coming soon’ on the windows. The latter is particularly pertinent, considering that The Simpsons is produced by one of the major all-consuming media corporations.

Whilst jokes based in our experiences of popular culture engage us, one does worry that these unpaid promotions are no different from paid product placements. The old PR adage that any publicity is good publicity rings true for these corporate giants. Nike claims to have been touched by their critics. They and other retail corporations claim to have responded to labour exploitation criticisms and eventually owned up to the off-shore contractors and are pleading better behavior. Even criticism, though, keeps their name in lights. (Should I stop writing about them?)

Whether there really is space to protest is contestable. Whilst some argue that the internet has opened up new space and Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass activists are taking on urban streets, and the culture jammers the billboards, it is also harder to find space without a logo. Klein includes some inspirational stories of communities who have thrown the logo back and refused to take the money. One poor US high school rejected Nike’s offers of sponsorship because it involved painting the swoosh across their basketball court. But this is a hard choice, as schools are forced to seek sponsorship as government withdraws from funding schools.

At an Ontario school, the sports teacher, who wanted his mainly working-class and ethnic minority charges to reject the hold of Nike and co., organised a fashion show. Students paraded the cool clothes to a running commentary about Third World worker exploitation, and performed skits about how kids are made to feel bad about not having the right clothes and so on. The students responded with the reasonable question of, ‘What then are we to wear?’ ‘I don’t want to have to be some sort of major political activist every time I go to the mall’, complained one girl. Protest in other ways too, argued Klein as the guest speaker.

This, too, was the first question asked at Klein’s public lecture in Melbourne. She again emphasised that while consumer protest has its limitations, it is a useful gateway to get people involved, and hopefully move to the next stage of understanding and activism.

Klein also characterises No Logo as a tool, she deftly illustrates her argument as she stirs up readers’ personal outrage at how they are being manipulated by the corporations, and then takes them smoothly to the logical outcome — that workers need to organise collectively. For Klein is pro-union, which unfortunately is not characteristic of a lot of anti-corporate/anti-globalisation activists.

Whilst she would not want No Logo to be just characterised as a story of labour exploitation, Klein does come from good North American left liberal stock and is not backward in recognising the class dimensions of her story, as the above examples demonstrate. In an interview in Melbourne’s Age newspaper, she said that she is heavily influenced by anarchist theory, and this comes through in her enthusiasm for the diversity of individuals, groups and actions, and her strong endorsement of direct or grassroots democracy. Klein does not bemoan the lack of a ‘party line’, as do the traditional socialist groupings that are feverishly trying to recruit the emerging activists. She weaves a strong pattern of alliance building between unions, environmental, cultural and social activists, which characterises this new social movement.

But still, what is it to be ‘anti-corporate’? Does it mean more than to be angry about being manipulated as to what you buy? Does it mean a deeper sense of a loss of control over more than just purchasing decisions? In reading No Logo, at times I was not sure whether the actions chronicled were more than youthful rage against the machine.

Klein does rage against the corporate theft of regional culture, whether it be small-town America losing their high street ambience to Wal-Mart or the all pervasive ‘swoosh’ on the backs and feet of youth. Naomi Klein is not breaking new theoretical ground. She does what a good journalist can do. She has assembled extensive and persuasive evidence to support her contention that there is a new global social movement. The new energy is coming from a new generation of activists who, depending on who they are, may or may not recognise their legacies. The welcome arrogance of youth tends to assume that no one has done this before. Klein knows this is not the case and she gently weaves into the story the continuities of protest over labour exploitation, rampaging corporations, environmental destruction and the loss of community space and democratic freedoms.

She acknowledges that much has been learned from the identity politics pervasive in the previous decades that have no doubt contributed to contemporary alliance building across differences and diversities. However, she is also critical of the self-absorption and blindness of the sort of ‘politics of image not action’ that dominated her time at university. She says, ‘We were too busy analysing the pictures being projected on the wall to notice that the wall itself had been sold.’ The cool hunters are quite happy to add minorities and even protesters to their images, as they constitute more markets to exploit.

In the end though, anti-corporate protest is limited not by the diversity of banners and the T-shirts at S11s, but by the limits of the collective imaginations. Whilst some are protesting against capitalism armed with century-old anarchist and marxist blueprints and others have an understanding of the need to recreate local sustainable communities and grassroots democracies, the suspicion is that much anti-corporate feeling is ephemeral. Have we cut through the thrall of branding when anti-corporate T-Shirts, incorporating corrupted versions of the logos, become fashion items?

Far too much of the anti-corporate movement’s focus is upon the corporations to improve their act. This has very swiftly been taken up by the spin doctors who are able to reconstruct their masters as ‘good corporate citizens’.

The challenge for the activists who have passed through the gateway of raging against the corporate machine is to take others with them. The questions at Klein’s Melbourne appearance did not suggest that her ‘fans’ had got the point. They wanted to be told how to do it, and wanted to construct Klein as a celebrity. The Age sub-editors also did not get it, or purposely sought to undermine Klein’s message by titling her interview ‘Just doing it’.

Klein had spent most of her time in Australia with activist groups, doing the more important networking and alliance building. The public lecture was sponsored by an independent bookshop (logos plastered all over the stage) and was sold out attracting a crowd which was a mixture of students and a lot of older people. I hoped the students would pick up on Klein’s comments about the need to focus on the next WTO round, especially the GATs and TRIPs and how Melbourne University’s ill-fated MU Private venture can open the door to outlawing public education funding as an impediment to free trade. But no, they wanted to know where to buy their clothes and what companies Klein personally boycotts.

Whilst Klein warns against, it, there is a dangerous tendency by anti-corporate advocates to hark back to presumably better times and some very worrying notions of small-town, small-business utopias — which enable the right-wing populists to join the anti-corporate bandwagon. Presumably some capitalism is OK, as long as it isn’t overdone. Big government, too, is railed against and yet it is the failure of governments to take on the corporations that is also justly criticised.

It is popular nowadays to argue that governments have failed to take on capitalism, so there is no point in wasting energy on them. However, this argument misses an essential point. There is a huge difference between demanding accountability from corporate capitalism and surrendering to its power. We want to break the nexus between the corporations and government. Transnational corporations would be quite happy to replace annoying governments, and they have quite a history of doing so. Government should not be let off the hook.

Whilst we may criticise the lack of real democracy in our political systems, the anti-corporatists need to remember that we want to be citizens of the world, not shareholders of the company.

There are alternatives, but writing about these was not Naomi Klein’s project in No Logo. In researching and writing No Logo, she has made a terrific contribution to the growing anti-corporate/anti-globalisation social movement. It is a deservedly popular book even, I’m glad to report, amongst commuters on my morning train (after Harry Potter, of course.)

Jeannie Rea has been raging against the corporate machine for a long time.
She also teaches Gender Studies and Public Relations at Victoria University.

I was reminded of this eaves-dropped moment when I looked at the films which emerged from 1999′s millenial anticipation. It brought back the confusion of Geeks One and Two – trying to fit a desire for authenticity with an exploration of new technology. Last year saw the release of films which posed similar questions but in other ways: messing about with the idea of self and playing on anxiety about the status of the human body. Three, in particular, which take up this identity/body speculation, are Existenz, Being John Malkovich and Fight Club.

With a concentration on the body, Existenz is typical of David Cronenberg’s filmaking. Having both written and directed this latest production, he was able to exercise many of his familiar representations of a cross-over between the body and technology. Like Videodrome (1983), Existenz indulges in some salaciously gooey connections between hard technological artefacts and the soft tissue of organs. In this film, the key image is a computer-like game which is programmed into a ‘MetaFlesh Game-Pod’. It is, in turn, attached via an ‘umbycord’ to the player. The cord plugs right into the body at a ‘bioport’, looking like a cross between an anus and a power socket, located at the base of the player’s spine. Existenz explores a dissolution of the boundary between the world of objects – still objects, even if they are squishy and pulsating – and the skin-bound realm of the body. Unlike the sad story of Geek One, the body is not made absent by technology, rather a kind of technologised body dominates Cronenberg’s vision of a new self. This is a common aspect of many speculative or science fiction films now: the future has ceased to be shiny and clean, like in Star Trek, and has become instead grimy and disordered, like in Blade Runner. Perhaps since Ridley Scott’s Alien, technological development has been incorporated into the banal mess of living. Of course Cronenberg’s messy technology extends this further still, being likely to make squelching sounds as its secretions collect in a puddle on the floor. The representation of technology as an imposed order, or as a means to control human and natural environments, is replaced by a kind of organic ubiquity. Soft and meaty machines are everywhere, like microbes or creeping weeds. Instead of the Enlightenment image of the human as sophisticated machine, Cronenberg goes in the other direction. We are presented with a machine that squeaks when you massage its bumps; bringing it closer to our own fleshy potential for intimacy and horror.

I was also struck by the similarity between Cronenberg’s ‘Metaflesh Game-Pod’ and the ‘LUMP’ or ‘Life Form with Unresolved Mutant Properties’ which features in the computer-manipulated images by Australian photographer Patricia Piccinini. In Psychotourism 1996 and Psychogeography 1996, both recently acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, the LUMP appears as a kind of baby being shown around simulated landscapes by a computer-glossed mum in the form of Sophie Lee. Piccinini has described the LUMP as ‘the human form completely redesigned by an engineer and an ad agency; physiognomically efficient and marketably cute’. (Gallery, Dec 1999-Jan 2000)

Aside from the visual similarity between Piccinini’s imagery and Cronenberg’s, the theme of the marketability of organicised technological fantasy is another link. (I hope this will eventually bring us back to the problems of Geeks One and Two.) The narrative in Existenz revolves around the consumer trial of a new game which plays like the now-familiar computer adventures. However, instead of images flickering in a beige box or clunky goggles, the game is acted out within the ‘space’ of the players’ minds – a kind of networked dreaming. The sinuous circuitry, kidney-shaped mobile phones, and games which hook straight into the unconscious, are the result of carefully managed marketing. All the action, real or otherwise, takes place within a focus group of potential consumers. Standing in the role of producers, the film has ‘Antenna Research’, the typically faceless corporation staffed by young designers and promoters. It is mysterious in its decision processes and apparently centreless in its structure. In the background there is a fear of betrayal from within the invisible company, creating an X File-like atmosphere of paranoia about institutions. The theme of manipulation of the individual by unseen forces is strong here, like it was in another of 1999′s body/consciousness movies, The Matrix. While that film could be read as an anti-capitalist fairy story infused with an individualist populism (which the US also produces in another form: the right-wing militia), Existenz is more mundane in its representation of the way the market reaches inside us. The manipulation of desire sits uncomfortably alongside an expectation of increased freedom, creating a murmuring dissent within. It’s a contradiction already familiar to our two Geeks.

Like Existenz, Being John Malkovich places the desire to expand the self into the heart of the contemporary consumer. But both films show this desire for image commodities being accompanied by an anxiety about how we can hold it all together. How can any part of a person – identity or body – remain inviolate against such a pervasive want? Being John Malkovich presents this terrible freedom explicitly. The film works from the fantastic premise of a ‘portal’ which allows anyone to enter the body and mind of the celebrated actor John Malkovich. The Malkovich ‘ride’ lasts only fifteen or twenty minutes, but the intensity of total integration into somebody else has ordinary people lining up to experience the ordinary life of a semi-famous man. The porousness of Malkovich’s consciousness is an accident of fate, not a condition of his fame. In this world anyone could, at some point, be open to unwilled occupation by others. Malkovich’s fear of having no part of himself which is not fluid, not able to be tapped by strangers’desires, is the other side of the consuming self. Being John Malkovich, like Existenz, shows an openness of the body leading to a kind of fissuring of being. The ease of access to alternative identities not only represents a techno-enabled liberation of consumption, but also a profound exposure of the self – identity unhoused.

In Existenz marketable objects are like bodies and in Being John Malkovich the whole self is for sale, body and soul. Both films show crowds of consumers unafraid of the technical processes which they must undergo in order to absorb other people as images. While this might be celebrated by some as a breakthrough to the post-human, the nastier side of the breach is the way we, in turn, become more like things. The logic is essentially pornographic in the way that all our desires become freely available. Our appreciation of others is separated from any surrounding meaning which might unwrap the consumable parcel. This is where Fight Club shows a swing in the opposite direction, helpfully pointing out the differences between you and your apartment. This film reasserts the body as the primary location of identity, but not without finally slipping into nihilism. The disquiet about an exposed self and the conflicting desires for authenticity and freedom, which haunt Existenz and Being John Malkovich (and our Geek friends), are the real meat of Fight Club. This longing for vividness of experience is the linking motif across the three films. Authenticity of self becomes the same as feeling things intensely. But in Fight Club the power of intense consumption has reached its limit. The strong identification through solid commodities (Ikea’s lifestyle-in-a-lounge-suite packages are targeted nicely here) is replaced by a communalism based on a reassertion of masculinity. Risk, death and violence – usually invisibly present in information societies – are made explicit. So the fearful anticipation of the plane or car crash, with which we quietly live, is instead met head-on in a kind of ritual embodiment where men beat the hell out of each other. There are parallels with Trainspotting in this withdrawal from the clean and tidy self that shops for identity at the mall or through the Internet. The alternative presented is an authenticity derived from the exaltation and suffering of a body under pressure. And I can almost see those Geek boys in the fight scenes; the murmuring need for intensity charged up to a testosterone scream. Maybe, if they hadn’t had good IT jobs to go to …

The men in Fight Club find worth in the exposure of euphemism. As they crack open the smooth surfaces of the spectacle society, as in guerrilla operations they destroy pieces of corporate art, chain stores and banking centres, they increase their sense of group identity. Even if that action is no deeper than a ‘boyish’ pleasure in destruction, the physical – even libidinal – thrill endows meaning in pointed contrast to the models offered by pop psychology or the work ethic. But Fight Club, again like Trainspotting, also points to the difficulty of containing identity in extreme physical experience. It requires continuous escalation of the way that the event, the body and the self can coincide. The whole burden of self-formation is heaped onto the body. A charismatic male leader, the physical closeness of other men and the continuous presence of risk are all that holds the group together. Along with the masculine pack mentality there is a kind of anti-modern rejection of technology, bolstering these men left behind by a de-industrialised society. Locating identity on the body appears to be stabilising, reclaiming self from the seething flow of transient images.

While Fight Club tries to fix the self in the exhilaration of the body it celebrates the primitive, presenting a physical kind of identity as constrictive nostalgia. Of course it is not surprising that a film coming out of a Hollywood studio (Fox) would portray a commune as regimented, brainwashing and backward-looking. In that generic requirement, Fight Club reverses its critique. The expansive aspiration of identity, which drives vertiginous consumption to new heights in Existenz and Being John Malkovich, even breaks out in base world of Fight Club. (Protecting the pleasures of plot, I won’t reveal the film’s exact twist on the inventive resources of identity.) The solid boundary of muscle and sweat becomes a claustrophobic restriction. Worse still, nothing comes after the intense physical moment. The face-to-face meeting with destruction and risk is merely a respite from an ongoing meaninglessness. In the end, total body identification provides an authenticity as lame as piped images and electro-simulations.

Am I any nearer a resolution of the Geeks’ prescient problem? Does the kind of oozing and physical technology offered in Existenz and Being John Malkovich provide some kind of satisfaction of their desire for intimacy? I don’t think so. Those Geek boys were talking about a kind of presence which isn’t enabled by the simulation of proximity. Getting a sense of the virtual surface of interchangeable personas doesn’t get Geek One any closer. The inadequacy of that kind of spatial solution is even a half-acknowledged tension within the films themselves: the anxiety of a constant and caustic search for authentic identifying images. And the other side of their troubles, the hope to expand the self in new terrain, tipping over into abstraction and ephemera? Geeks beware the return of the repressed body as played out in Fight Club! But physical intensity diminishes over time, not unlike the aura of the image-commodity. The body can’t contain the longing to augment the self in the world – a fact that the Computer Geek knows well.

Is there a way through? If only this Book Geek had sat down with them and talked face-to-face, instead of just listening in like some low-tech bugging device. Maybe we could have worked out a reconciliation of self: perhaps a new social form which incorporates a certain mobility of identity and a bodily security. But then maybe resolving such issues will require more than a tableful of Geeks, talking.