Inside, however, something different has been done, for the central atrium is vast: ten, fifteen stories high, and irregularly shaped, with jutting angles, narrowing at the top—as if a cavern has been hewn from the finished skyscraper. At its base, lush trees and plants soften out the look, crisp and perpetually watered amid the air-conditioned chill. A vast, steep escalator takes you to the top. It seems unsupported. Near the apex, it’s dizzying, vertiginous—near successful in its attempt to imitate a sense of the sublime found in nature. Then you step off, into the multiplex cinema.

The multiplex is always at the top of malls. Perhaps for reasons of space, or perhaps it is part of the marketing. Cinemas remain, despite (or because of) the spread of the DVD and direct download, the primary modern manner in which an escape from the bounded ego is possible—the body dissolving into the dark, the two dimensional image rendered three dimensional by our projection into it, the manufactured dream state that plays at the boundary between the head and the world. To place them at the very height of malls seems a reward, an endpoint to the pilgrimage of consumption. Working your way up the levels, you become steadily more loaded with anxiety, frustration and dissatisfaction until, as a reward for your labours, you can dissolve entirely for a couple of hours at the point nearest the sky.

Curiously, though it is an art film, The Tree of Life seems made for this multiplex experience. The fifth film—in forty years—from legendary director Terence Malick, it is the most unusual of things, a genuine, audacious, ambitious work of art (as opposed to that distinct genre, the ‘art film’, of middlebrow psychologistic drama) with a mainstream release. Malick’s previous films, such as the thrill killer movie Badlands and the early twentieth-century historical epic Days of Heaven, were concerned with matters of existence and being, rather than psychology—as befits a former philosophy professor and Heidegger scholar. Thereafter he took a near two-decade break. After two successful relatively conventional films gained him a degree of latitude, The Tree of Life represented an uncompromising go at making not a bolder statement about life, but a different sort of encounter with it. Using the frame of psychological drama and memory, the film busts open into something entirely other.

Ostensibly, The Tree of Life is a memory film. An architect (Sean Penn) working on a large skyscraper project, a building of cold monotony even by contemporary standards, recalls his childhood growing up in Waco, Texas. In reality, most of the film is taken up with this, the family’s story told backwards, from the news of the death of the architect’s brother in Vietnam in the late 1960s, to their childhood in the 1950s. Such a precis doesn’t capture it of course—Malick’s style is a film essay, memories and moments, montage and deep focus, reminiscent of the classic Soviet filmmakers. More importantly, in the middle of the film is a third section which sets all on its head, for an extraordinary near half-hour sequence. Rendered in CGI graphics, it essentially tracks the history of the universe, from an abstract rendering of the sudden beginning everywhere (erroneously, usually described as the big bang) of the universe, via the formation of stars and galaxies, the planet, the seas—and then, suddenly, a jellyfish-like creature seen from the underside, swimming through the deep ocean, distant light perfusing the surface. If description of the other sections falls short, here it is actively misleading—using up-to-the-minute HD vision, the sequence is continually arresting, astonishing, even when it teeters on the edge of self-parody—as when, emerging from blackness again, we realise we are looking over the sleek back of a brontosaurus-type dinosaur. Taking the risk that the audience’s mind might wander in the direction of Monty Python, Malick’s cinematic intent is nothing other than to be present not to Creation in any limited sense, but to Being. The movie that surrounds this sequence is entirely resituated by it—both the architect remembering his childhood in the throes of a mid-life crisis, nor the fraught psychological drama of an angry mid-century father, squeezed by industrial work, threatened and rivalrous with his growing sons.

Without the ‘third sequence’, the film would be no more than another memory film, better than most. The sequence centres it instead on the pure process of life, running beneath the particular, the historical, the encultured. The psychological drama of the film is a giant McGuffin, a false lure to draw the attention while the movie does its work. The film is a general critique of the idea that meaning could be found in existence simply as the summed product of a series of meanings, of intention and desires, without a ground beneath. This is given form in the very different look of the present-day and 1950s sequences, and with a gesture to Heidegger’s fundamental notion of the Earth and the Sky, as separate realms and orders. The silver and blue of the present-day, the reflected emptiness of the skyscrapers, is contrasted with a 1950s shot in earthy, brown tones, of a drama taking place in low-slung single storey houses in a small regional city. One of the most quoted parts of the film in reviews is a rapturous sequence in which the mother lifts one of her children up, and points to the sky. ‘See that—that’s where God lives’, she says. Reviewers have assessed that for religious sentiment, but it is equally interpretable in an a-theist fashion—the Sky is the realm of God, or the idea of God. The Earth is where we live. Trying to live in the Sky—the architect’s buildings with their mirrored surfaces look like nothing less, spaces carved into the heavens—is worse than hubris. It’s an error.

There’s no way of knowing what The Tree of Life will look like in ten years time—either a classic or period kitsch. But coming out of the cinema, staring down the escalator into the fake cavern, the world was thrown into sharp relief. Beneath lay the Kowloon streets, arrayed much as towns and cities have been for seven thousand years, the intersection of people in tight spaces, engaged in the business of life. Beyond, visible out the windows, was Shenzen, the companion city to Hong Kong, which the Chinese government has put up in a quarter century. Pretty much a fishing village the day before yesterday, it now sprawls hugely, mega-block on mega-block of new skyscrapers, a 400 square kilometre supercity. Hong Kong has a compactness to it, shaped by the natural focus of the harbour. Shenzen is a city on a plain. There was nothing to stop it continuing across the earth forever.

Good place to see The Tree of Life. A good time too. After six weeks travelling down through China, Shenzen stood as a continuing reminder—most especially of the inadequacy of most accounts of the place. Endless colour supplement articles about the place joining the world, cranes on the horizon, don’t really capture the categorical nature of what is happening; that China is embarked on the largest-scale transformation in human history, something of another order entirely to the relatively piecemeal way in which it occurred in the nineteenth-century West. Financial journalists and the like write of the vast pace of new building and urbanisation, but they cannot capture how that feels or means—that cities of two, three, five million people have been, in effect, entirely demolished and rebuilt, soaring into the sky and doubling their size in the process, as people come in from the country. It has been done before, elsewhere, this shift from the horizontal to the vertical, with all that that entails, but not on this scale or even at this magnitude. Even for a stranger, with no knowledge of what was there before to compare it to, it is a confronting experience, unquestionably unprecedented.

To travel down the middle of the country from Beijing was to move in a state of double ignorance—cities of which one had never or barely heard of, yet larger than all but the half-dozen Western mega-cities, arose ahead, entirely new-minted, yet with thousand-year histories that nothing in the city disclosed. Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongking … it was impossible to know what had been there before. What is there now is mile on mile of apartment towers, business hotels, shopping malls—Western-style in origin, but only in the sense that the West had got there first. Once you take-as-given that modernity—capitalist, socialist, or mixed—will focus on urbanisation, industrialisation and consumption, then skyscrapers and malls follow automatically, accumulation patterns written down in concrete.

Nor was there much mystery about how this categorical shift had come about. For three decades after the 1949 victory, the Chinese had experimented with radical models of social transformation, drawn from the wildest dreams of pre-Marxist utopian socialists. In the late 1970s they had changed direction. To the outside world that looked like a capitulation to a set of unquestionable rules about modernity—markets, property and eventually liberal parliamentarianism—when in fact it was a transformative plan as radical as those that had preceded it. The Cultural Revolution had been directed towards one type of transformed society; its successor was directed towards another, but with a similar determination to sweep away pre-existing structures with resolute lack of sentiment. Cultural icons, symbols of ancient privilege, had been smashed in the Cultural Revolution, but what came after it would level whole cities, annihilate villages in their thousands, and rupture the pattern of life—of the hutong—that went with them. Because the country remained a planned society, in which the planning was overwhelmingly concerned with directing how and where market forces would flow—while also preparing the way with state-inaugurated projects far beyond the capacity or imagination of the post-Keynsian West—China’s progress was essentially super-charged by this dual effect, modernity’s transformative capacity refined and distilled.

Planning mitigated the anarchy of capitalist production, its flow towards consumer goods; property and the market kicked a high-growth high capitalist economy into top gear. Western Thatcherites and neo-liberals visited over the decades to hold the country up as an example of the existence of enduring economic laws—even as the application of such laws in the West were draining it of industry, coupling growth to consumption, and turning the entire region from creditor to debtor status. Arriving in Shanghai weeks earlier had been propitious, because it coincided with celebrations for the ninetieth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. At night, on the front of the largest skyscraper in Pudong, the massive financial district built across the river from the old European Bund, the hammer-and-sickle was projected thirty storeys high on a background of red, the whole thing reflected, shimmering in the river. For a moment one felt science-fictive, caught up in the familiar plot of a time-traveller waking in an alternate reality—like Francis Spufford’s recent Red Engineers, the documentary novel in which it is imagined that Khruschev’s USSR, steered by technocrats, races ahead of the West. Then one remembered—this was real; something had happened that could not be easily assimilated to simple models of privatisation. Capitalism was the means; the re-engineering of being—Chinese in particular, human in general—was the aim. Amid the pitiless skyscrapers, the vanishing hutongs and courtyards, brown, earthy, had the same look of ground-hugging closeness as the low, plain houses of The Tree of Life. China was the project to make such a transformation into humanity’s unquestioned path; the film’s power arises from its understanding that that historical moment has occurred, and that, under its sway, life—its character, its qualia—becomes the thing in question.

Throughout that journey—which in retrospect would feel like a journey to the film—the world outside China provided a descant of sorts. While the Middle Kingdom appeared to have entered a sustained period of post-histoire—reading modern histories, one’s attention wandered after the Cultural Revolution, because there seemed little further history to tell—the West seemed to be coming apart at the seams. In the United States, a President both diffident and stymied was unable to articulate any notion of how the nation might either regain its dynamism, or change its idea of what counted as success. Meanwhile his opponents in the Republican Party left the sphere of modern politics altogether—the organisation, driven by its radical wing, became the political expression of a cult, fusing not merely distrust but hatred of government with literalist Christian beliefs.

By this conception, America’s woes were the result of error in heaven and on earth, turning away from both God and the sovereign individual. Though they paid obeisance to the Founding Fathers—indeed fetishised the Constitution—their beliefs were no longer grounded in Jefferson or even Hamilton. Instead the discourse of the newly-elected Republican Congress was dominated by one thinker—Ayn Rand, inspiration not merely to marginal figures such as Ron Paul, but also to principals such as Paul Ryan, the man charged with drafting Congress’s 2011 budget. Filled out by a Tea Party movement, inaugurated by right-wing media, but now ranging free of it, the American Right has essentially taken a fundamentalist turn, a hysterical reaction to a national and economic decline rooted in larger global trends. Like all fundamentalists, from Calvinists to Wahhabists, it had honoured its founders by wholly replacing their ideas. Christian grace became Calvinist predestination, Mohammed’s radically universal monotheism became Wahhabist disdain, and the American founders’ notion of a balanced polity reflecting human multiplicity has become Rand’s manic and nihilistic gospel of self.

In Europe there was equal and opposite reaction to the same stimulus, the official acknowledgement of what had been obvious for half a year—that there had been no real revival after the crash of 2008, that what commentators were describing as a ‘double dip’ was simply the evaporation of the minimal funds directed towards recovery, and the re-emergence into visibility of a deep stagnation. There was no revival because there was little to revive. The states of southern Europe were effectively broke—having got short-term benefit from the euro, they were now constricted by the EU’s tight control of the money-supply—and the whole of European economic policy tilted towards Europe and the North. In Britain the past three decades’ evisceration of manufacturing, the reliance on banking, intellectual property and other services—like rents—made any simple re-starting of the economy difficult; and the cuts imposed by the Tory-Libdem government rendered it impossible.

In one corner of Europe, Greece’s agony became an emblem of the contradictions faced by the West—bowing to every austerity demand, its ruling socialist party managed to contract the economy by 7 per cent. Still, neither its interest rate nor its credit rating improved and it moved inexorably towards default. The familiar image of its black-clad koukouloforei—the hooded ones, a mix of political anarchists, petty criminals and a middle section of semi-politicised disaffected youth—were played gleefully on China Broadcasting’s English-language channel (often as not fronted by former ABC newsreader Edwin Maher).

In August they were joined by images from Britain, as first London and then cities of the North and West erupted with unrest, uprising, rioting. Triggered by the police killing of a black man in a suburb where riots had erupted a quarter century before, they rapidly became something else—fluid, separate breakouts targeting shopping high streets, mixing confrontation with looting. Some of them were kickstarted by professional anarchist activists—someones’s gotta break the first window—but they kicked on as kids from the city’s public housing estates poured into the streets. The riots were a testament both to the postwar Labour settlement—the idea that public housing should commingle with private areas rather than be ghettoised—and the post-1979 abandonment of it, as inequality soared between people living cheek-by-jowl. Thatcherite culture had—unwittingly—elevated personal consumption to the apex of British values; unlike the Reagan revolution, no spiritual dimension partnered the new invitation to define your worth by your wealth.

As the high streets filled with chain stores offering the sort of goods that were as much symbols of meaning as objects of utility, a ghastly social experiment was inaugurated. How long can you sustain a population of millions of people—unemployed, semi-employed, untrained—on the bare means of life offered by benefits, while around them a privileged class enacts the idea that consumption is life? The answer was: until August 2011, when masses of such people attacked not police stations, MPs’ offices or the like, but Footlocker (a shoe chain specialising in trainers) and Currys (a TV/computer/electronics chain). They looted them, then they burnt them down, a double-whammy whose significance would be hard to miss.

Pundits of both Left and Right struggled to assimilate the rioters into a framework. That they related to the cuts—and the sense that even New Labour’s limited attempt to address poverty had been abandoned—was obvious; there had been no riots in Scotland or Wales, where cuts had been limited by regional governments. But the actions had no recognisable political content—even the vestigial one of smashing up a McDonalds. Essentially it was the other of the autonomous processes by which the Western economy was run—any sense of property or propriety had been abolished at the highest levels of the Western economy, well before 2008. In a world where money, production and opportunity are mysterious, inexplicable flows, bearing no relation to work, worth or effort, the looting of one branch of a 300-strong chain store, the removal of goods from China—they may as well be from space—seems a mere continuation of a process. A glass window, in that respect, becomes not a mark of ownership, but a barrier of no reason or right, like the invisible impediments encountered in dreams. Smashing it, in that respect, is a sudden return to the real, a bringing of the impossibly immaterial, skyward trending economy back to earth.

Such an act resonates. Watching it on TV in Hong Kong—the island proper, that charming imperial remnant daily leaching energy, opportunity, life, to Kowloon and Shenzen—it appeared to be, in its inchoate way, a rupture of the same order of Malick’s film. The riots combined protest, criminality and amorality in equal measure, but at their core was the desire to interrupt, to record a dissent from a totalising system, even if those carrying away plasma TVs did not present it to themselves in such a way. From the Tea Party, through the riots, to The Tree of Life, there was a common sense—that this could not go on. The Tea Party’s answer is to retreat so deeply into fantasy as to be lost to dialogue; the rioters were excluded even from the purposeful language of political manifestation of a generation ago. Malick’s film proposes that the breach has occurred within our lifetimes, that the error is not departing from God, or Jefferson, or Hayek—or Keynes for that matter—but from a primordial truth, that we cannot live in the Sky.

China has gathered the twin forces of modernity—the Will of Communism and the Prometheanism of the market—and put itself at the head of humanity in seeking to refute this idea. Malick’s film—journeyed to in a fake cavern, amid manicured and tamed foliage, at the top of an escalator to nowhere—was an argument against such a thing, drawing on an idea of life, of being, sprung from insights prior to modernity’s prejudices and assumptions. Did the times produce it now, this meditation Malick has struggled with for decades? Did they ensure that it would be the first great ‘transcendental film’—cinema that tackles Being in the manner of Dreyer, Bresson, Antonioni—to achieve multiplex success? Does one’s conviction, leaving it, that a social irruption both political and beyond-political may be closer than one had hitherto suspected testify to the power of its rhetoric, or the fatal conceit of revolutionaries, that the absurdity of the present is a guarantee of its imminent crisis? Or is it the world speaking through the artist, opening both creator and audience to a more radical vision than they could otherwise conceive, with all the possibilities that that suggests?

The overall narrative to which Pusey, and then others, referred was first and foremost about recovering the Australia nation.  This would have to be the shell for any appeal to Australians, but now turned away from Howards ‘paranoid’ version to a softer nationalism, which could be grown naturally enough upon the bedrock of who we Australians really are.  Pusey’s descriptors included ‘secular’, ‘sharing’, ‘national’ and ‘practical’.  We are at heart, he said, Benthamites – utilitarians, not taken with theoretical or spiritual claims or absolute values, a common sense people with, it would seem, a modest self-interest that had been perverted by neo-liberalism.  In relation to climate change, a cornerstone issue for this future politics, the message must not be overwhleming.  The ‘urgent present’ of current campaigning must be re-narrativised in ‘lived time’ drawing on our ‘historical past’.  Constructing recognisable stories about ourselves that draw on those distinctive traits, we will be able to see ourselves as agents with a collective story at stake.

Overall the conference, over two days, was stimulating.  Not every paper-giver was as upbeat about the possibilties, with Green activists of different organisational alleigances more or less depressed by the hugeness, if not impossibility, of the task ahead.  But the obvious fact of people being engaged, and so many of them being young, was testimony to sense abroad that politics is again on the agenda.  Indeed, it is everywhere being discussed how we might reform our democracies, re-orientate markets, change values.  The emerging ferment is evident in the pages of this issue of Arena Magazine, living by its brief as an arena of a broad Left.  On the one hand, Tom Nairn positively assesses Rudd’s new social democracy from the vantage point of a dismal showing by British Labour, while Guy Rundle, on the other, sees Rudd as a ‘far from emancipatory’ micromanager of comtemporary life.  Andrew Thackrah discusses an influential new British book on climate change strategies and new possibilities for the citizen, as opposed to the consumer, while Russell Marks, countering the ‘racist’ accusation in relation to Indian student attacks, draws on some of the ‘new nationalism’ arguments put at the Deakin conference.  Alternatively, in a virtual how-to build your own, Race Mathews argues for a different tradition of worker co-operatives, while Ted Trainer and John Martin posit a ‘simpler way’ with a rural or close-to-nature orientation, as a kind of lived transitional practice.

The Deakin conference wasn’t nearly so broad a church.  There was a strong sense of an already forming policy orientation, and this has been evident since in The Australian‘s series ‘What’s Left?’.  Also led off by David Mcknight, it has had contributions from a range of writer activists, unionists, and politicians, with Robert Manne providing a broad politico-philosophical framework, also championing the new social democracy idea, as already clear in his writings in The Monthly since Rudd’s essay in that publication in March this year.  No new party is being suggested by this loosely associated group, so it would seem that the task may be to create a think tank or develop a forum that will provide tapped-in ideas and create a culture of new thinking to bolster Labor’s efforts, especially in relation to climate change.

But the rush to policy around a notion of ‘values’ is only partly reassuring, while the rush to confirm the said national trait of utilitarian (no theory, optional spirit and plain practical common sense) is not at all.  While Pusey’s observations may be empirically based, one couldn’t help wondering about both the religion that was once – not so long ago – a common feature of Anglo-Celtic Australian life (when spirit and moral absolute matched), and the many faith-based communities that have come to reside in Australia since the Anglo-Celt’s great secularisation.  And quite apart from this, given that the values and ideals evinced in the long period of neo-liberal ascendancy appeared to have their own transcendent quality, and given that utilitarianism may be a key undergirding of neo-liberal common sense, references back to some typical Benthamite Australian, rather than a break into something actually new, seems likely to be a hollow echo of a need rather than a meaning-laden call to change.

Robert Manne’s framing piece in the ‘What’s Left?’ series provides a larger canvas for this discussion of value and of theory, where some seem to think values can be egged into reality and theory dispenses with because all good people already know the answers.  Manne commences with the French Revolution and the values of liberty and equality (he neglects fraternity) which, he says, set the whole liberal ball rolling and around which the dominant perversions of 20th-century politics were played out: communism in its pursuit of equality denying liberty, and Nazism in its communalist fantasy denying equality on the basis of racialist ideology.  As the century proceeds, the two men left standing – social democracy and neo-liberalism – remain committed essentially to liberty, though of different ilks, with very different outcomes for the question of equality.  All the same, rejecting extremes of earlier communalist fantasies, and now in the death throes of neo-liberalism, those two values, liberty and equality, remain the pole stars of true democracy, indeed ‘social democracy’.

Social democracy in this view is social liberalism, not democratic socialism, and capitalism is simply not a target.  Neo-liberalism certainly is, but the competitive basis of capitalism itself, the forms of utilitarianism it has spawned, its fundamental counter to substantive equality, and indeed its denial of freedom of many peoples in many parts of the world, is simply left out of the equation.  In fact in this key article in a series called ‘What’s Left?’, which is an historical survey, albeit brief, of the key moments of Western political history, and now the key issues of the day, no mention whatsoever is made of ‘capitalism’.

This is intriguing.  The first thing to observe is that Manne is a political theorist, not in any way a social theorist.  The form of society, the means by which people are integrated into the collective life of a social form, the way culture constitutes us historically as significantly different different types of people over time – picket fence individualists (normalised subjects) in modernity, transgressive boundary-crossers (autononous actors) in postmodernity – is not on his radar.  And so any understanding of how these culturqal forms, embedded in deep structures of social and individual experience, underpin and play out in relation tot he valeus of the time and questions of the day is mightily restricted.

Those people with left histories now hopping on board this social democratic train may be deeply contrite about the role played by communism in the radical denial of both liberty and equality in actually existing socialism, and desperate for action in the face of climate change, but they may also be indulging others in writing a very partial history of the modern period.  The values of liberty and equality in Manne’s piece are themselves disconnected from their roots in the rise of modern capitalism and the form of life and power it implied; just as left struggles for 100 years are given no mooring in the depredations of extreme class conditions under domestic capitalism or colonial oppression; just as contemporary assumption about what individuals desire and feel they deserve seem to be denied specific analysis, perhaps for fear, ironically, of our utilitarian bent being upset by ‘too much theory’ and the expectation that good people will simply respond to good values.

There’s no doubting that politically a break into new consciousness has to be made, and that it will be in part arbitrary.  Fear, logic or intuition: a break has to be made from the claims and chains on consciousness that the form of society has over our being (which is never total).  But we must not shy away from a deep account  of the nature of that being, which is always historically re-constituted, and which can help to account for the difficulties in carrying through good programs on the basis of good values that others don’t share, or not yet.  Narratives are one thing, but structural accounts of the specific nature of contemporary social forms offer the more solid ground for working those narratives out.  In this case, while a certain practical attitude may define something about Australian life and national culture, the idea that some past good Australianness can be dug up and appealed to, as if our goodness was simply perverted by ‘neo-liberalism’, is likely to miss the constitutional commitment both of Rudd and the population to a utilitarianism now fed by the expectations of a post-modern market and high-tech solutions to our myriad problems.  If Manne could not name capitalism in his short history, resting entirely on a notion of neo-liberalism to do his work, this must be because it is seen primarily as a political philosophy, which has engineered a system, rather than an efflorescence of deep trends in the meshing of intellectual technique and capitalist development over centuries.

It was May, and Barack Obama had come to Portland to speak ahead of the Oregon primary. The campaign, unprecedented in American political history, had been effectively over for weeks, Hillary Clinton’s last chance destroyed by a disappointing result in Indiana. Her insistence on staying in the campaign had given the contest a near unbearable intensity, a sense of expectation, above and beyond the intrinsic fascination of Barack Obama himself. Though Hillary Clinton’s and Obama’s policies 2were essentially identical — a minimal social market welfare program combined with a liberal national security state — the contest had split the Democratic voters of the country, less between black and white or male and female than between old liberals and new ‘progressives’, between those who saw the task at hand as selecting a dependable candidate to go toe to toe with the Republican candidate against those who believed that loftier ideas and a fresh approach were worth fighting for. Southern whites and industrial states tended to prefer Hillary; Democrats from the new industries, from the inner cities and the exurbs tended to prefer Obama.

Portland, a one-time logging and fishing town that had become, according to one commentator, ‘the capital of alternative America’ was, despite its small black population, Obama central. Come November, they would have turned out for a brown-billed duck had the Democrats selected one, and they would even have turned out for Hillary, despite the dispiriting prospect of a Democratic dynasty replacing a Republican one. But Obama’s candidacy meant for the first time in a generation there wassomeone that left-liberals could get unambiguously, unrestrainedly excited about. Even George McGovern, the 1972 anti-war candidate, had been, after all, a standard issue white guy Senator from South Dakota. Bill Clinton, the first baby-boomer candidate, transformed the electoral campaigningby playing sax on a late night TV show and was a mesmerising speaker to small groups, but he was tarnished long before the third party candidacy of Ross Perot lifted him to the White House.

In Obama people had something else — a man whose candidacy seemed historic not merely by virtue of his identity but by his unique oratorical and personal style, a mix of civil rights agitation, Southern Baptist oratory and community organising motivational speaking that floated free of any concrete political narrative, whether of nation or class. Short on actual policy, it irritated the professional political class as much as it inspired those who heard it, the poor or well-off, the well-connected and the marginalised. Speaking of bringing America together, of transcending narrow political games, his stump speech always led up to the same climax: ‘We are the people we have beenwaiting for, and our time is now’. Hearing it live it was impossible not to be moved, to be stirred within.

Though the primary campaign would stagger on for weeks more, until Hillary’s campaign expired in a whimper after Puerto Rico (a primary for an island whose people cannot vote), that speech in Portland was essentially its culmination. By July, with the nomination secured, Obama was widely criticised for moving towards the centre. The criticism was inexact — politically he had always been of the centre. What he had done was move from heaven to earth, supporting a federal wiretapping bill, advocating the death penalty for child rapists, supporting a Supreme Court pro-gun decision, and in general doing anything to prevent himself from being outflanked on the Right and characterised as a weak liberal. The move didn’t affect his positive poll ratings, where he outpolled Republican candidate John McCain by5–6 per cent. But for many of Obama’s supporters, the switch was like the air being let out of a balloon. Fundraising dropped, and many openly expressed their disappointment in blogs, even on the candidate’s website. The Obama campaign, always slick, appeared to many now to be little but that. When the Obama family appeared for an interview that included Barack and Michelle Obama’s two girls under ten, viewers were simultaneously captivated and disarmed, even though Obama’s excuse, ‘it was a spur of the moment thing’, manifestly failed to fit the circumstances — the interview crew were flown out to Montana to film it — or the medium, the cable channel Access Hollywood.

Nothing that Obama did was out of the ordinary for an ambitious politician reaching out from his Democratic base to a broader America, yet the sense that this betrayal, this disappointment, was deeper than all the rest was palpable. Such disappointments adumbrated the gap in American political and social life that Obama’s candidacy, his person and his vision, had filled, however briefly, and explained, in its negation something about the predicament of contemporary American life.

* * *

When the primary season began in January, around 70 percent of Americans felt the country was ‘going in the wrong direction’, and around 25 per cent approved of theleadership of George W. Bush. Through the spring and into the summer, as gas prices soared, food prices rose, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis begin to close down whole neighbourhoods, the ‘wrong direction’ figure rose to around 85 per cent. When gas hit $4 a gallon, and as the unmistakeable signs of a recession became visible, the changed conditions began to bite into American daily life. Jobs began to reverse month on month and key early indicators of tightened circumstances — a plummet in restaurant takings, for example, and a rise in fast food sales — manifested in sudden price wars between the major chains, which saw $2 hamburgers slashed to $1 or less, a measure of the slender margins by which many Americans were living. The bailout of Bear Stearns and other Wall Street banks, followed by the larger bailout of the general mortgage provider companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, coincided with a crisis point for many people — the inability to afford the gas necessary to commute to work or the shops in the vastly spread out, poorly serviced outer-suburbs and exurbs that had sprung up around American cities in the last twenty years. Though the candidates of both parties go out of their way to present policies that are ‘tax-neutral’ or tax-cutting for anyone earning less than a$250,000 a year, more than 50 per cent of American households earn less than $50,000 a year, and 20 per cent less than $25,000. For a full half of the population, life is a continuous vigilance against sudden costs — medical not covered by insurance, car repair — that might suddenly blow a hole in a tight budget, catapulting them into unresolvable debt. For that last quarter, life has simply been a round of trade-offs — food for gas, gas for heating, hearing for medicine, medicine for food, and round it goes again. The true impact of the recession was that it was squashing that second quartile into the first — real poverty was reaching right up into the middle class.

Yet Americans have been through recessions before. More than modern Western Europeans or Australians, theyare used to a reversal of economic circumstance impacting on everyday life. But this current episode is different —there is a wider sense of anxiety about, a dominant mood In Obama people had something else — a man whose candidacy seemed historic not merely by virtue of his identity but by his unique oratorical and personal style, a mix of civil rights agitation, Southern Baptist oratory and community organising motivational speaking that floated free of any concrete political narrative, whether of nation or class. of bewilderment. The recession feels to many both particular and general — oil prices, which may be the result of speculative gouging, are also the expression and reminder that cheap gas, and the world built upon it, is coming to an end. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite recent lower levels of violence in the former, seem pointless and purposeless, a symbol of a lack of American will and clear direction. The relentless tide of illegal immigrants across the porous Mexican–US border could betaken as a tribute to American primacy, but instead feels like the multitudinous third world pressing up against the borders. The immense control apparatus established by the Bush administration and centred on the Department of Homeland Security continues to extend its power, recently musing on the possibility of having all American airline passengers wear an electronic bracelet that cabin staffcould switch on to disable the wearer. And as the Olympics approach, everyone is talking about China and its phenomenal growth rate. The country may be the largesteconomy and most powerful military in the world, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way on the ground.

But nor are such macro conditions, relayed through the media, the sole or even principal determinant of how apeople feels about itself. Though commentators such as Fareed Zakharia in his recent book The Post-American World focus at length on the effects of mass realisation that history is beginning to tilt in another direction and favour other players, he typically overestimates the effect that things of moment to a global affairs commentator will have on people whose lives are more bounded by local life and conditions. Here is where one finds a deeper, and in the US media, substantially unexamined transformation of daily life over the last two decades. Even as late as the 1980s, the United States was substantially an industrial and manufacturing economy, with life based around the suburbs recognisably attached to large cities, or to mid-size towns. Over the 1990s and into the current decade, a combination of global economic change, weakened labour unions and loosened zoning laws would see changes in all these features that would add to a definite yet under-reflected upon change in the way of life. As high-paid full-time industrial jobs gave way to casualised, short-timed and split-shifted labour; as core productive jobs were increasingly replaced by service jobs; as malls began to wholly replace high streets, and mega chain-stores began to replace independent concerns; as both cities and towns began to sprawl out of any recognisable central form, social life, built around a way of life grounded and bounded in space and time, began to attenuate. A host of works such as Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, or James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowherehave explored this, but the very idea of it barely breaks through into the spheres of media which have become, in part due to that very transformation, principle arenas of interchange.

Other societies have gone through this, of course, but few have been committed so thoroughly to the process of uprooting the previous conditions of life. The protection of trade unions, social security or urban planning extended elsewhere have been absent from the American transformation, and the absence of each has exacerbated the other. As workplaces have diminished in importance, so have local trade unions and sources of an alternative view of the idea that workplace flexibility brings free choice. As downtowns, high streets and town centres have ceased to be centres of social life, the memory of their meaning starts to be lost. As jobs disappeared in the 1990s, a massive effort to portray welfare as enslaving was launched, as was the revival of a notion of puritan persistence and faith in providence replaced the by idea of a state with obligations to its citizens.

The result of this social vacuum was that new sources, not merely of information but of meaning and value formation, moved into the centre of life. By their very nature, the mass unidirectional media — the cable news channels, the major networks, talk radio — succeed by purveying a concrete vision of life that is at odds with the decontextualised form by which they reach out to an entire nation. For FOX news channel or Rush Limbaugh’s radio show this was ‘American values’ standing up against the political correctness of liberalism and multiculturalism. What did it matter that the town centre had been destroyed, when the spirit of the small town subsisted on the thousands of stations of the Clear Channel network? What did the absence of a local context matter when the values of neighbourliness and plain common sense persisted on ‘The O’Reilly Factor’?

This basic switch dominated much of the politics of the 1990s, helped to a degree by the particular political form of American left-liberalism which, lacking a strong Marxist base, was ill-equipped to deal with issues affecting people on a class, as opposed to gender or race basis. Though Bill Clinton had begun with some left-liberal instincts, he was keenly aware that his victory had been based on the votes that Ross Perot, running on a right populist platform, had taken from George H. W. Bush. After the 1994 recapture of Congress by an assertively right-wing Republican Party, Clinton swiftly moved to the Right. Essentially the period from 1994 to now has been dominated by this process of simultaneous dismantling of American community and its ideal reconstitution in the more abstract spheres of the media.

The media was not the only place where a distilled and distinct form of community could be found. The other wasin religion, and fundamentalist Christianity in particular, which underwent a substantial expansion in the 1990s.Though it had been a growing political force since the 1973Supreme Court Roe vs Wade decision established abortion as a right, its boundaries had hitherto been fairly solid —confined to the communities, southern and western, in which it had originally developed as a form of Baptism. By the 1990s, and especially into the 2000s, both church attendance and the belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible had skyrocketed. Politically, the effect was felt as are lentless series of direct voter propositions added to ballots in an attempt to skirt the letter of Roe vs Wade, takeovers of school boards in an attempt to put creationist/intelligent design ideas on the syllabus, and the simultaneous construction of a nationwide home schooling network. Though some have suggested the numbers are exaggerated, by 2004 it appeared that a clear majority of Americans had major doubts about evolution and scientific proof, and a significant minority are ‘young earth creationists’, believing the planet to be no more than 10,000 years old. Though the degree to which evolution had ever been accepted by many Americans from the South is not clear, the figures represented a clear decline from the 1960s.Yet the new wave of religious literalism was occurring not despite an increasingly scientific society but because of it. A willingness to believe in the most directly contrary and literal story became a mark of faith and commitment, a source of identity and meaning. The United States was undergoing one of the greatest passages into irrationalism of any modern society in history.

Churches, especially the burgeoning megachurches, became the concentrated social correlate of the cable media. As the globally focused CNN lost ground to the ranting, populist FOX News, a certain new formation within the culture fell into place. For an increasingly decentred society, it offered a concrete grounding that offered to withstand any transformation of the actual way of life. Furthermore, it offered to stand as a rock in the midst of further attenuation of stable frameworks, so that the process could continue. The megachurches themselves often found themselves in cheap real estate areas in the exurbs, close to the strips of fast food outlets. Their vast size makes them unsuitable for small congregations as it reverses the effect, overawing the living congregation with empty space; thus last year, before Christmas, a day when people don’t want to drive long distances, some churches quietly announced that they would not be holding a Christmas Day service, and that people should instead pray at home. It is difficult to imagine a more explicit clue about the form of one’s worship. In offering a form of belief, they privilege the ecstatic over the abiding, the experiential and visceral over the mundane. A literal and simplified creed is essential to such an operation.

But not everyone is culturally or personally suited to the literalist message of religion and or tradition. For many people, the hole in American life that had begun growing in the late 1980s became a gaping one in the 1990s. And it is to many in that predicament that Barack Obama speaks. His mix of oratory and liberal reasonableness confused commentators and blindsided his opponents because they had never seen a form of liberal spirituality before. Obama is spoken of as a new JFK; in fact he is more like a new FDR, speaking of having nothing to fear but fear itself. ForAmerican politics, the religious types did the prophetic oratory; liberals talked in a secular language of rationalism.

This brilliant stroke on Obama’s part would appear to be part of one of the most knowing and calculated political strategies of recent decades. It is part and parcel of who Barack Obama is and where he came from. Born in Hawaii to a Kenyan father and an American mother, both liberated from more limited roles by the 1960s, he grew up in Indonesia with a stepfather, and then returned to Hawaii before studying in California and New York. As he notes in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, that globalised, hybrid Gen X existence was difficult to deal with during his adolescence, and a sense of being in the world was further problematised by a couple of years at Occidental College, California, where the various strands of the ’60s and ’70s — black liberation, new left Marxism, Fanon, post-structuralism — were part of the mix. At Columbia Obama by all accounts spent a year reading Nietzsche, the Bible and the existentialists, among other authors, and in Chicago he came into contact with the organization founded by Saul Alinsky, the grand old man of community organising. Unlike many black politicians, Obama’s organising work wasn’t exclusively focused on black communities — a lot of it was focused on mixed communities ravaged by the collapse of the Chicago steel industry. There he applied Alinsky’s theory that people will only begin to take some control of the process of changing their lives when the system has so failed to honour its obligations to them that an anomie or despair has set in. At that point, said Alinsky, you can reach them.

Alinsky’s approach appears to have filled out in Obama the questions of identity he had pursued throughout his life — pursued because his complicated background had given him no choice but to. For Obama, what had become of paramount importance was the question of the will, of the purposive self. Where did it come from? Could it be lost? Could it be regained? If meaning and purpose were not supplied by a given background, how could they be found? In other words, Obama speaks to the American people so successfully because he is effectively using the dilemmas of his own life as the framework with which to deal with the country — he is effectively treating the Presidential campaign as a nationwide community organising project. What he understood — that Hillary could not and John McCain does not appear to — is that talking in terms of either Clinton’s prosaic ‘solutions for America’ or McCain’s boilerplate triumphalism does not acknowledge the degree of despair, defeat and failure of will among many Americans. These are the people, long since given up on any sense that they belong to the system in any way, that Obama is hoping to draw back in, and deliver him a victory that will turn a half-dozenRepublican ‘Red’ states into Democrat ‘Blue’, thus reshaping American politics and setting the Democrats upto be the ‘American’ party for two decades.

Whether this would make any substantial difference remains to be seen. Obama’s gearshift into a moreconventional politics reminded people of what they should have already known — that he is innovating tactically within a standard political framework. What is of interest is what the success of his strategy tells us about America today, and why a young, mildly leftish black man leading acrowd down to the water in Oregon should be so freighted with significance.

Guy Rundle is an Arena Publications editor.

This move to open power in the aftermath of the terrorist attack marks a new stage in a process of global extension of its explicit power and of the institutions — overwhelmingly the semi-open market — upon which they are based. The Gulf War was an intervention into a dispute wholly contained within the Arab world for the purposes of guaranteeing a compliant oil producer — that ‘Nintendo’ war, whose casualties John Pilger reminds us of, spawned the Iraq sanctions and the immense sufferings of the Iraqi population. The signing of the GATT and the establishment of the WTO exposed the South to Northern economic power in a way that spawned the Zapatista uprising and the new global movement that sprang from it. Prior to that the Carter government — as former advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski now admits — established and funded the mujhadeen before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and was intended to provoke just such a move (Nouvel Observateur 15.01.98). That act not only destroyed what had been a modernising society and launched upon the seas the asylum seekers our Navy is now firing upon, it created much of the extra capacity for the renewed global heroin trade — a crop the US encouraged the muj’ to develop as a funding base. Militant Islam was selectively encouraged by the US, but also served as a conduit for and expression of the rage felt by the Arab world and central Asia at the endless manipulations to which it had been subject by the West. With the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the attack, it all came together in a double fireball. Such a movement — combining ‘national’ rage with a religious calling out and networks of money and power — has expanded far beyond the root causes which gave it a start. Militant religion has become a mode of production for suicide warriors. Initial grievances about international relations, Palestine and Iraq have given way to the pure desire to land a blow on the enemy, to take revenge for being no more than a target in the Nintendo conflict. As has been noted, the attack on the Twin Towers was a very late skirmish in the Gulf War. That such a movement began as a reaction to the same global racket which also spawned the new global movement (sometimes called anti-globalisation movement) has been used by the Right to portray the opponents of the US as a single entity. The reverse is the case — expanding US power is a single entity which attracts the resistance of groups with totally opposed worldviews.

That the Twin Towers and Pentagon attack was evil and ruthless goes without saying. Yet the political uses to which it has been put are manifold. The Right, both in the US and here, has sought to label the very act of reflecting upon global power as an act of ‘blaming the victim’ and US culture — as Ray Nichols notes — has slipped over into an unabashed triumphalism, endorsed by the President. The attack on civil liberties is occurring on multiple fronts. As Damien Lawson and Nehal Bhuta note, much of it over here was prepared for by the mockery the government made of separation of powers and rights during the Tampa affair. The process of extending executive power into every sphere of life can now continue. Since the overall cultural and political effect of an expanding market is to make executive power into the only type of state power that is real (the strong leader, the no-nonsense government) crises such as war-scares cut with the grain of the age.

Parallel to the attack on such civil liberties as exist is an attempt to conscript the public emotions in the interests of foreign policy. For many, such sympathy as one had for the victims of the attack and their relatives became increasingly tinged by bitterness that the lives of those living in New York came to be valued more highly de facto than the nameless, numberless dead of the South. But as with the death of Princess Diana — which acted as a dress rehearsal for this sort of thing — reason and emotion came to be deemed mutually exclusive, and cleaving to the former an act of disloyalty. The implicit proposition — that the degree of one’s sympathy should be influenced by the spectacular character of the event or the number of cable channels covering it — is truly immoral. Nevertheless, it has become the official attitude. As Douglas McQueen-Thomson notes this is a war as constituted in language as any war that ever occurred, yet to ask the question of what a ‘war on terrorism’ really means is to invite the charge of ‘appeaser’. The idea is meaningless and the fact that various government and military figures talking about it being a ten, thirty or hundred years’ war indicates its true character. It is a blank cheque that the US and its closest allies — our government included — are writing themselves to give US power an unlimited pretext to abuse the sovereignty of other peoples in the name of protecting its own. It is a unilateral abolition of other people’s borders at the same time as one’s own are made into fortress walls. Our government is also dipping its toe in this water with the manufactured refugee ‘crisis’. Fortress Australia is being sandbagged with places such as Nauru whose independence has been de facto abolished using the leverage of their bankruptcy. The US has now abandoned any distinction between private terror organisations and the states within which they are located, yet this too will be selective. Pakistan continues to host Kashmiri terrorists, autonomous Kosovo, Albanian ones. Both may go quiet for a while, but only as a tactical maneouvre. The ruling as to who is in and out of the war will be as capricious and partial as the old freedom fighter–terrorist distinction.

The shocking nature of the Twin Towers attack has given the exercise of American power a new domestic strength. A peace movement has begun, but many middle of the road liberals who would support, say, an end to sanctions against Iraq, will find themselves lining up with the US government. As Kimberley Serca notes, the most high profile ‘left’ figure to line up with US power has been Christopher Hitchens who has figured the Taliban–bin Laden nexus as ‘Islamic fascists’ in a conscious recall of the popular front of the 1930s, but he is only the most eloquent of many who would have a similar disposition. Nor can one retreat into any easy blanket pacifism on this issue. Mohammed Atta and his cohorts were clearly acting as a self-contained group who had planned the attack over several years. Yet it also seems likely that they were partially funded and mentored by bin Laden’s Al-Qaida group — and it is clear that Al-Qaida is thoroughly intertwined with the Taliban — one of bin Laden’s wives is the daughter of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Now that bin Laden has replied to US actions with the promise of new attacks on the US mainland and a call to the Muslim world to launch war on the US, there is clearly scope for some legitimised US action. One could put it another way — the US now has the sovereign enemy it needed for a war. It may soon have many others.

The moral impossibility of supporting the war as it is being conducted is clear, even for those of us who are not pacifists. The bombing of civilian populations is unacceptable in any circumstances other than as defence against total attack by a whole sovereign power and this has clearly not occurred in the case of desperate Afghanistan. The Taliban’s hosting of bin Laden would have given the US the right to call on a UN force to bring him to an international court of justice — had, as Andy Butfoy notes, the US not embarked on an unprecedented effort to destroy international authority in recent months and years — but it no more sanctions an attack on the whole society than would Cuban exile raids on Havana give Castro an excuse to strike at the United States.

The issues of ‘host’, ‘sponsorship’ and ‘territory’ are far more complex than it would be convenient for the US government to admit. Yet looking at the still smoking hole in Manhattan and a city whose communal life has become dominated by funerals the question comes back at the nascent peace movement: what is to be done about terror?

The question cannot be ducked but that does not mean it needs to be accepted in those terms, either in principle or in practice. Principle first. The current and ongoing role of the US in the global South makes it morally impossible to line up with. Palestine and Iraq are the two causes which serve as the pretext for bin Laden’s activities, yet the more serious crime has been the US government’s active and zealous enforcement of the IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs and the WTO provisions which allow for the transfer of wealth from South to North. The human cost of this process in unnecessary suffering and cultural destruction over the last twenty years dwarfs anything thrown up by the fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or first-wave colonialism in the rest of the twentieth century. It is done by bankers and bureaucrats who are explicitly aware of its human cost. It is presented as an inevitable consequence of development and globalisation, but there are humane alternatives available, even within the development paradigm — most notably a global protection of labour rights to organise and global support of convivial technology and financing (small-scale banking) — so the moral–political choice is real. The dead are not shot or exploded, they die — as did most of those in the Gulag — through overwork, malnutrition and preventable disease. The universality of the neoliberal market gulag — it will take anyone as raw material — obscures the common roots it has with the more explicit tyrannies. The horror of the Twin Towers attack and the fact that its agents were devoted believers in a premodern form of religion that had nothing to say about this dimension of America’s global role has led many commentators to call criticism of the US hackneyed or irrelevant — as if it were a fashion for less volatile times. The role of the US does not in any way justify the Twin Towers attack or anything like it by any organisation, but that is not at issue. The issue is whether the Left can morally line up with the state, as the British Left could in September 1939. The answer here is that, unequivocally, it cannot.

The dilemma of the American Left in these circumstances is similar to the dilemma of an anti-Nazi German in WW2. In retrospect resistance to one’s own government was the only moral course of action — at ground zero, facing the British, French and Soviets without illusion of their magnanimity would have made this course of action somewhat less shiningly clear. As the US gets deeper into the war and the possibility of uprising in Pakistan or elsewhere, or the use of chemical or biological weapons, or a dozen other scenarios become more plausible, the dilemma for the American peace movement will deepen. But here the practical buttresses the principle. There is no path to security for the US public through the war on terrorism.

The degree to which the American attack on central Asia will destabilise various Arab regimes is unknowable. At the end of WW2 Orwell argued that a third world war would be preferable to a nuclear stalemate, as the latter would cement a power system that could last indefinitely. The prospect of Arab uprising in a number of states is looked upon by many with a similar uneasy ambivalence, since the alternative is virtually uncontested US power with the tang of easy victory in its nostrils. Yet the record of the sort of groups that could make such an uprising, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, are blood-chilling (as it should be noted is the virulent anti-semitism and Hitler-worship which disfigures some of the Arab press). But such groups will be rubbing their hands with delight as the US pushes increasing numbers of Arab and central Asian peoples to a fundamental solidarity.

For Australians the call to solidarity with the US comes on several grounds — that the states of the world have to defend themselves against free-floating terror; that bin Laden and his organisation want to dominate the world and impose a particular form of shar’ia; that solidarity should be based on cultural and historical connection. The last of these has no validity whatsoever — since there is no sign that the US would come unequivocally to our aid in the face of threats to us from any other powers. One week after the Howard Government signed a blank cheque of support to the US government, Congress signed its own blank cheque — in the form of an unprecedentedly huge amount of subsidies to American farmers. This further example of free trade globally/protect locally is a measure of our special relationship.

Nor has the second of these propositions been established. Bin Laden has expressed a desire to destroy America, but mainly because America is — as he sees it — actively humiliating and oppressing the Muslim world. His concerns are overwhelmingly with the ‘purity’ of that world. Those who align themselves unquestioningly with the US will unnecessarily make themselves a target. Australia’s relative insignificance should, in this respect, be a source of security, not talked away.

But it is the first of these propositions — lining up with the state (or a coalition of states) against free-floating terror — that is the skein from which power and positions are currently unravelling. The ‘war on terror’ has thematised the big T, the twentieth century’s shadow, as its enduring enemy yet it is, as always, unlicensed terror that is subject to eradication. Alluding to some of the themes explored here by Angela Mitropoulos we can say that it is not violence itself but legitimacy, sovereignty that is in question.

Terror — not merely violence — is central to the question of the state and power. Violence is graded and allocated to citizens to varying degrees from sport to self-defence to private security. Civil life is contoured with different degrees of violence. Terror is held to be the preserve of the state alone. Private use of it tears a hole in the fabric of power and the rip can extend indefinitely. Though bound up with warfare from the earliest times, modern terror begins when the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations — the scorched earth policy of Roman, Tartar, Inca and Conquistador alike — shifts to the killing of randomly chosen representatives of a social group. The technique comes to fruition in the European empires (Captain Arthur Phillip’s capture and execution of six Aborigines, rather than an entire group, as punishment for raids for example). Terror installs death and power at the heart of life, rather than simply killing. The terrifying Other is then permanently at home in the psyche of the terrorised, and autonomously polices them. What came to be called terrorism in the nineteenth century — especially as practised by Russian radicals — we now know as assassination, since the principal target was the Tsar. He was targetted not merely as the symbolic personification of the state, but as its actual keystone, whose shattering would cause a collapse of the whole structure.

The intertwining of unlicensed terror and technology pushed the activity into the centre of Western political life and fears — as measured by two classics of turn of the century literature, Conrad’s Secret Agent and Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men. (The use of dynamite to dispatch one Tsar and US President McKinley so shocked its inventor Alfred Nobel that he invented the peace prize to make amends.) Terror thus haunted the imagination of civil society as the other side of technology — even though the actual risk it presented was vanishingly small. Three innovations transformed it into a weapon of unparalleled effectiveness. In 1916 IRA leader Michael Collins moved from a guerrilla strategy to one of urban terror in which enemy figures targetted were not the leaders — whose identity and sense of self was bound up with enforcing British rule — but the small-fry. British informers, sycophants and camp followers were killed for no reason other than being who they were — for precisely the fact that their particular death would make little real difference. Terror was thus pushed towards a general condition. Anyone pro-British was a combatant. Collins’s strategy was the template for modern terror and of such success that one of the next innovators took the names of the IRA leader as a codename — Michael for Yitzak Shamir. Shamir, with Menachim Begin, developed a strategy of outrage with the Irgun and the Lehi groups during the fight to establish Israel in 1948, employing not only ethnic cleansing (the massacre of the Palestinian village of Dair Yassen) but also excluded middle — the assassination of Folke Bernadotte, UN negotiator for the mandate — the extension of the definition of combatants (the dead in the blown-up King David Hotel included numerous non-military stenographers and office staff) and the pornography of death (the execution/murder of two British sergeants was filmed and the film delivered to Mandate authorities). The tactics outraged the mainstream Zionist armed group the Haganah, and they exterminated most such groups. To little effect — the British quit the mandate before a two-state solution could be negotiated, which had been the Irgun’s aim. Begin’s insight was that terror could live off the horror of its friends as much as its enemies — that it relentlessly and irresistably shifts the ground of politics, that anyone ruthless and desperate enough to use it will be rewarded — in Ireland and Israel’s case with statehood. When George Habash and Wadi Hadid of the PFLP defined all Israelis as combatants by virtue of their nationhood and the Japanese Red Army put this into practice at Lod Airport they effectively completed terror’s universalisation.

A grisly history, yet mild compared with the history of state terror — whether Red or White in 1917, the Nazis at Guernica, or the bombing of Cambodia. Non-state terror looms large on the social psychological horizon because it is purely rogue — not only is it unattached to any form of other power, it is resorted to when that power seems most absent, when the enemy seems all powerful. The attack on the Twin Towers took terror further into the territory of everyday life by its use of spectacle and icons. The venerable avant-guardist Karl-Heinze Stockhausen called it the ultimate piece of performance art. He was saying honestly what media outlets were acknowledging through their acts. Three days after the event, the US government had to ask the networks to stop playing the multiply angled footage of the event.

People can’t look at terror, but they can’t look away from it. It achieves the total presence in an enemy society, that the enemy assumes in the society of the terrorist. It turns everyday life against itself and reminds people that they are, at the bottom of it all, pure carbon to be blown apart at the will of the Other. The state’s great propaganda victory of this century has been to convince people that terror in uniform is not terror at all.

For the most part, this judgement has hinged upon the bombing of civilian populations. Prior to the 1930s this act was seen as the ultimate barbarity of the burgeoning doctrine of ‘total war’. Hitler’s use of it in Spain and Mussolini’s in Ethiopia deepened that identification, but it was also used by the British in Afghanistan, of all places. Churchill, who had been an enthusiastic proponent of both civilian bombing and the use of gas was the prime mover behind Britain’s WW2 practice of carpet bombing whole cities. At the time it was a major moral issue, with many Americans arguing that the practice rendered the UK morally equivalent to the Nazis, and obliged people of conscience to become conscientious objectors. Dozens of war movies have normalised the strategy as part of a general reinterpretation of the war as a crusade against the Holocaust —falsely of course. About the only part of the Nazi empire the Allies didn’t bomb was the rail lines to the camps. The WW2 model has served as the ground for the moral division between state and non-state terror ever since. The victims of terror fade to invisibility beneath the shadow of the bombers. I suspect I am not the only one who has had dismaying conversations with good-hearted friends willing to see ordinary Afghan people blown to pieces in their name — in order to make the world a place where civilians are not exposed to random airborne death.

The terror unleashed on 11 September has been as effective as any in history because of the unprecedented degree to which people’s lives are dependent on the technologies which have been turned against them. Whatever governments may say people know that hypermodernity is inherently indefensible. The current anthrax scare in the US is an indication of the widespread awareness that a further attack may produce casualties of five rather than four figures. Echoing a theme picked up by Paul James, it is the new willingness of people to achieve such destruction with their own bodies that makes most vulnerable the uniquely disembodied power structures of contemporary globalisation. And any attempt to lock down global society in the manner in which Israel is locked down would slow the velocity of global capitalism to a degree disastrous to its smooth working. As John Hinkson notes, the current set up is balanced precariously on hitherto unimaginable systemic risk, as expressed in contemporary insurance and banking funds. Confidence is as much a target as buildings.

The people of the United States wonder if life will ever be normal again. Yet for many across the world the presence of sudden death — albeit in a less spectacular form — is normality, and it was surely a part of the terrorists’ intention to bring this fact home to the American people.

The people they purport to avenge — the Palestinians and Iraqis — face a more mundane but no less lethal annihilation. When a globalising power has the capacity to visit such annihilation on people, such totalitarian destruction, it produces total opposition — those who believe they have no choice but to die fighting in order to live. Thirty years ago Arab resistance was expressed through the movements of nationalism and Marxism. Both these have been supplanted by a militant form of Islam which offers a transcendental, a spiritual, grounding for struggle that those other movements could only partially achieve. Thirty years ago suicide bombers were a rarity — now there are hundreds. Push hard enough and there will be suicide societies whose resistance is total. A form of Islam may steel such people for certain death, but that is not so different from the many people who have faced virtually certain death because they felt that they had no alternative that would still allow them to be a human being. The Vietcong are one example; the British crews of WW2 bomber command — the first suicide bombers, with virtually no chance of surviving a tour of duty — are another. Refusing to endorse someone’s ruthless disdain for the innocent is one thing; to believe, as many conservative pundits believe, that analysing the motives and contexts from which such people work is tantamount to dishonouring the dead is foolishness distilled. As Geoff Sharp notes, the fundamentalism of the terrorists has been called out by a fundamentalism inherent in the US version of globalisation itself — the relentless manner in which it seeks to make over all existing ways of life in its own image under the brand of ‘choice’.

The need to guard the security of hi-tech globalisation has made it inevitable that the liberal political sphere would come under pressure sooner or later. Attempts to extinguish it altogether will be a feature of the years to come, especially if the conflicts now occurring slide towards a more comprehensive global war. The peace movement that has now begun across the world has sprung in part from the global social movement that has rocked the cities of the world from Seattle to Melbourne to Genoa. In Australia it has also had confluence from the refugee action movement, to create a broad campaign based on expanding the principle that recent events have been only the most visible aspect of a rising global conflict. Such a conflict will only be resolved through genuine global justice, which will only come from a global movement above and beyond the official national and international bodies. Whatever is to come will be determined in part by our resolute actions, and anything is possible. We cannot know whether the best or the worst, reconciliation or destruction, will occur, but we can say for certain that whatever it is, it will be mutual.

Guy Rundle is co-editor of Arena Magazine.

Today we can imagine a rather different scenario — a war of hitherto unthinkable destructiveness between global power blocs, but one which does not result in species annihilation. Given the existing chronology it will be called World War III, but in reality it will be the real World War I — a conflict between post-colonial powers that is not focussed solely on Europe and the parts of Asia it owns, but involves the mobilisation of what were separate civilizations and are now multinational trading blocs with cultural features in common.

Like the twentieth century’s World War I, World War III will begin because sooner or later one bloc will believe it has no option but to strike first or be annihilated. The Belle Epoque period of 1890-1914 has been constructed in retrospect as a golden age of peace, at least for Europe. In reality it was a period of constant ‘war scares’, with at least a half-dozen occasions on which the European powers came close to conflict. We have seen the foreshadowings of a new series of such war scares with the confrontation of India and Pakistan, and the George W. Bush administration’s policy and rhetoric towards China. The recent US decision to withdraw commitment to international protocols on biological weapons had even its loyal deputy sheriff Australia squeaking in protest.

These tensions will be amplified in the years to come by a number of factors. The first is the new-found determination of the United States to openly assert its global power. As other groups start to use the mechanisms of globalisation to make alternative arrangements –witness the decision of Europe and the global South to proceed with the Kyoto treaty in the aftermath of US withdrawal — and as their dominance of hi-tech and other markets comes under threat, they may repudiate the facade of globalisation altogether, and use the Free Trade Association of the Americas as a geographically based power bloc, ‘protected’ by its missile defence shield. As the smaller states around China and India falter — both Pakistan and Thailand are effectively bankrupt — regions may become further destabilised, and the scramble to create power blocs via treaties or military annexation more rapid. Simultaneously, nationalism will come at them from the other end. Not only will there be the break-up of the most obviously vulnerable blocs such as Indonesia and the DRCongo, but hitherto solid states such as Mexico may find themselves under pressure.

As the deliberate underdevelopment of selected areas continues apace, anti-systemic ‘rogue’ states may multiply — Nepal could well be the next to join the list, if its ruthless Maoist guerrillas take Khatmandhu in the near future. The potential of complex global movements such as Islamic fundamentalism is open-ended. The likelihood of large-scale terrorism, with casualties in the thousands or upwards rather than the hundreds or so due to the late Timothy McVeigh, will become all but inevitable. Water scarcity will become an overwhelming geopolitical consideration.

For all these reasons and more — not least the prospect of a global economic depression coincident with the above phenomena — large-scale war may present itself as a recourse for the power blocs.

In the lead-up to such developments, one might anticipate a political crackdown across the Western/global Northern world: something more than the piecemeal attacks on the separation of powers and the presumption of innocence that occurs today — an actual suspension of the liberal political order. The technical mechanisms are all in place: the CCTV cameras which have been introduced in the ‘war on crime’; the facial-recognition software that makes their operation autonomous; the interlinked databases which will make surveillance total. The cultural mechanisms are in place as well. The tabloid media, year on year increases the pitch of persecution and paranoia, and has added the anti-globalisation movement to its roll-call. The ‘new’ Labour parties in Britain and Australia, and the US Democrats, have cued themselves into this political style and willingly contort themselves into a variety of illiberal positions to accommodate the rhetoric. Right-wing parties have ventured into the territory of deep reaction in order to retain some form of political branding. Lip-service to the liberal political sphere is now universal — actual defence of it, rare. The missile shield above, the surveillance state below — rogue states, rogue groups and rogue persons will all be dealt with.

Clearly many authorities are gearing up for this. There is every sign that their patience with the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement is exhausted. Having believed that the Seattle demonstrations marked a highpoint of the movement, they were faced with a protest double or even triple that size in Genoa. Even conservative estimates put the turn-out at a minimum of 100,000. Having already resorted to scheduling large meetings of these ‘open’ institutions in closed states such as Qatar (the absurdity of which makes for bad publicity) or on the internet (which left them open to being hacked into) the Genoa G8 meeting retreated to a walled-off zone of the city.

Nothing could be more symbolic of the deep-structure of globalisation — quite aside from the fact that the wall was built of shipping containers, perhaps the key technological innovation responsible for the global economy. Nor is there any doubt that the fortification process will continue. The numbers attending such protests are now on such a scale that they could begin to spark continuing protests and the establishment of zones of autonomy after the conference itself has departed. Had ten, or fifty, protestors rather than one been killed in Genoa, what sort of cycle of response and counter-response would have been initiated?

That the current protest movement is now debating whether to take on the label ‘anti-globalisation’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ is a measure that an analysis of the structures of contemporary global power has begun in earnest. Nevertheless there is still an insufficient appreciation of the way in which both modes of globalisation — that of decentring and distributing power on the one hand and that of consolidating and integrating it on the other — persist, and the impact that such an observation should have on political strategy.

The new global social form promises infinite interconnection with no centre, but at the moment this is appearance rather than essence. The internet, half temporary autonomous zone, half global shopping mall, presents itself as a deterritorialised space. Ideally it is, but in reality most of it is now located in server farms in Boston and across the metropolitan United States. As the recent California power blackouts, the product of a conjunction of the ‘new’ economy and privatised utilities, have shown, the ‘weightless’ economy is weighed down by all the traditional concerns of political economy. The ‘free’ media space of the internet is the alienated labour of those — the Indian working class, latino-americans — who produce software and hardware in conditions similar to those who have worked looms or made cars in the past: dirty and routine work, done so that others could live a ‘free’ life.

That space will not exist forever. The powers-that-be are treading carefully because they realise that global dissatisfaction with the current arrangements is widespread, and that the response of the trade union movement, and of liberal-left organisations and citizens, to a global crackdown is unpredictable. On the one hand, a glance at the tabloid newspapers would assure one that it was a done deal, and that reaction will triumph. On the other, a reflection on the numbers who come out for, say, a reconciliation march — not to mention an S11 — would equally highlight the residual radical and democratic spirit that exists across the social order.

This unpredictable situation puts the ball in the court of radical organisations of the global North. The anarchist and postmodern critique of the Leninist mode of organisation is well-taken. But if there were to be a crackdown, it would seem that the postmodern/anarchist organisations would be gathered up instantly, devoid of any resources to resist the sudden transformation of the State from liberal pluralist to expression of reactionary global order. One must now pose the question as to what is in place to resist the prospect of a crackdown. What resources and actual organisational structures exist within radical groups who emphasise ‘autonomy’ to withstand a change in political space? It is a question for those who celebrate the decentred nature of their political and organisational structures.

Those who imagined that the twentieth century was the most brutal in humanity’s history may be guilty of pollyannaism. The coming century will be the narrow passage through which human beings pass — on the one hand the unprecedented development of modes of destruction, on the other the burgeoning forces of a fully human global–local/ethical–political order — and we will either survive it, and in doing so open up new and better possibilities for living, or pass through war to annihilation or worse.

De Quincey’s volume was one of the first in what has become a long line of addiction memoirs — although the honour could equally be awarded to the oeuvre of Coleridge, whose dreamy opium-filled work of the Kubla Khan variety alternated with more prosaic letters describing the ravishments of the condition, from cravings to agonising constipation.

At a time when the use of illicit drugs is rising across the world, despite the massive armouries of the ‘war on drugs’; when the supply of both opiates and cocaine mounts remorselessly year on year; when whole countries — Colombia and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan — have become, with varying degrees of willingness, drug factories; when large areas of the global South are turning from opium use to heroin use, and when whole popular cultures — such as the youth culture of the UK — come to exist at the service of chemical consumption, it may be necessary to more deeply consider the central cultural role of such substances in contemporary life.

Such an inquiry becomes more urgent given the Howard Government’s recent launch of a national drugs campaign, and the increasing indications that a Beazley Government will be in a social conservative model substantially indistinguishable from that which now exists. The current campaign was inaugurated largely in response to the flood of cheap heroin that engulfed Australian cities — particularly Melbourne — in the late 1990s, and the large numbers of deaths that resulted from overdoses, as addicts became exposed to less diluted product. Few of these lives would have been lost with a medicalised supply of opiates in controlled dosages — the old British model of allowing registered addicts a safe supply — yet there was never any possibility that such a policy would be adopted.

Instead, the government’s strategy focusses on the conservative notion that stable family life is the best protection against dangerous behaviours, and adds to it the more liberal notion that communication between parents and child (rather than the imposition of parental authority) is the key to avoiding illicit drug use. The communication is overwhelmingly strategic — there is provided a catechism-style document with questions and answers to prepare the unwary parent for any curly ones (such as ‘well you took drugs’, the approved answer to which is that we all make mistakes) and a helpful table outlining the effects of various substances is provided. All effects are detailed, save for one — that drug-use is frequently pleasurable. The substances that the young are being warned against seem to produce only headaches, lethargy, paranoia, psychosis, cancer and developmental disorders, which would surely make any half-bright teenager wonder why they were being cautioned against them in the first place. There is only the slightest nod towards the possibility that opiates may have a more addictive capacity than other substances. This contingent category of illegal substances — drugs — bounded by the legal regions of caffeine, tobacco, alcohol and legal stimulants such as pseudoephedrine, moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

Despite the explanation of their chemical properties and physical effects, the overwhelming impression is that they gain their power from pure illegality, from their embodiment of risk. Their anarchic possibilities serve as the occasion for a more than equal and opposite over-reaction — the imposition of systems of control. In the twentieth century this was confined to the police and criminal justice system on the one hand, and the therapeutic, medical and educational institutions on the other. The current campaign is an extension of the ‘reefer madness’ school of anti-drug propaganda, but it is also a departure, in which the entire repertoire of social responses becomes scripted — a feature clearly visible in the TV ads, in which families are shown watching an earlier series of TV ads and talking about them in a variety of approved ways. It is the manner by which the mutual interdependence of ‘drugs’ and empire is confirmed and extended in a globalised context.

Drugs and empire

Indeed empire and ‘drugs’ — in this case meaning consciousness-altering substances used in the absence of any ritual or medical practice — are two sides of the same coin. By now many people have some knowledge of the degree to which the British Empire was involved in the sale of opiates from India to China — fewer realise that it was on this trade that the nineteenth century expansion of the empire was funded and, of equal importance, that the modern form of drug addiction was created.

By the 1760s the East India Company had been running various quantities of opium poppy from India to China in steadily increasing volumes for several decades, but it was not until Warren Hastings, the Governor-General, ascribed the resistance of the Moguls to the increase in poppy cultivation, and reorganised the trade using the resources of the British army and navy that it began to generate significant revenues. The Company — which eventually became the government — had justified its trade on the basis that its monopoly allowed a control of the supply of opium, whose dangers were already beginning to be recognised. It needn’t have worried overmuch, since the combination of power and supply of dangerous substances had an illustrious recent history in Britain — William III and Mary only agreed to accede to the throne if they could have a license for the import of ‘geneva’ liquor — or ‘gin’ — that was, to that time, little known in England. The subsequent flooding with heavy hooch of a market accustomed to ale gave us Hogarth and the temperance movement among other things, and was an early example of pushing/loss leader marketing – sold by the glass to undercut local beer.

That the global pushers were aware of the hazardous nature of the substance was indicated by the draconian legislation used to keep it out of the British population in India, much less at home. Poppy had been known as an analgesic in Europe since the time of the Crusades, but it was rare, and merely one part of the herbal pharmacopeia.

By the early 1800s, several events served to set the pattern of modern addiction in place. Romanticism had blossomed in European culture, with the Faust myth — the individual damned by his own ambition — becoming central to self-understanding of artistic producers. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ Blake wrote, and while his journey was largely on foot, others were getting a help along the way — principally through laudanum, a mixture of alcohol and opium, favoured not only by the poets, but also by anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, inventor Sir Humphrey Davy and many others. Morphine, an alkaloid opiate derivative, was synthesised in 1803, one of the first drugs to have an effect many times more powerful than its natural form, but the high cost of production slowed its introduction to everyday use.

In 1830, the opium trade was worth 2 million pounds per year — 50 per cent of the cost of running the government of the British Empire. The Chinese emperor had twice attempted to resist the trade, and twice been beaten down by imperial firepower. Tories opposed the trade, while free-market liberals vociferously supported it, arguing that it was clear that Chinese labourers needed the drug as it stimulated their efforts and gave them respite from the back-breaking work they had to perform.

This was curious to many — that Chinese opium users would be stimulated by the drug — since it was frequently observed that Indian users were relaxed, even narcotised by it, while Europeans seemed to be subject to both. Initial suspicions that the effect depended upon whether the poppy was smoked or eaten proved incorrect and the debate raged. In the same period as De Quincey’s classic work emerged — not to mention Tennyson’s The Lotus Eaters — Henri Murger’s Contes de la Vie de Boheme was published in Paris. This collection of short stories centred around the artistic margins of urban life set the template for modern bohemia, a text which for generations was subsequently reproduced in their lives. While opium was not yet a part of their lifestyle — the price was still sufficiently high that a contemporary commentator could call religion its equivalent ‘for the masses’ — excess was central to it. Not the excess of abandon or the pure carnivale, but an excess taken as the mark of a free spirit, a pure soul.

Yet it was not until the 1860s that the shape of modern drug-use began to emerge. The first mechanised war — the US Civil War — brought morphine into mainstream usage. It also began a cycle whereby large numbers of addicts were released into the community at the end of each conflict — to such a degree that morphine became known as the ‘soldiers’ disease’. The hunt for a cure in the latter part of the century led many to a derivative of the South American coca plant. Cocaine was the prozac of the 1880s, the wonder drug that promoted energy, alertness and cheerfulness with no apparent side effects, its most famous champion being the young and ambitious Dr Sigmund Freud.

Coca-leaf chewing had been a part of Inca culture for millennia, and the Spanish occupiers of South America had been engaged in an endless tussle over its use, with the clergy — who objected to its ritual and pagan usage — wanting it banned, while merchants — who admired its ability to extend the stamina of local labour far beyond the capacities of Europeans — presciently arguing for a respect of local cultural differences. Even then it was noted that leaf chewers would pace themselves, rarely choosing the largest or most robust leaves of the plant — an early version of smoking ultramilds. What was an integrated social practice in its traditional setting became something else entirely when both the practice and the active ingredient were extracted and placed in a setting of cosmopolitan modernity.

Both refined drugs — morphine and cocaine — showed themselves to have a power of movement above and beyond the herbal drugs of previous eras. Both connected to human physiology to a degree hitherto unknown in culture and beyond the powers of nature. At the same time as explicitly manufactured demand was starting up — with the rise of the modern advertising industry and the brand — the numbers who found themselves at the mercy of the ‘soldiers’ disease’ and addiction to the cocaine that had been presented as its cure was rising remorselessly. The answer was another drug, introduced in 1898, and guaranteed by its manufacturers to be non-addictive. An analgesic substitute for morphine, it was also seen as a way for the ‘heroes’ who had succumbed to ‘soldiers disease’, so it seemed like a good idea to give it the trade name Heroin.

Heroin

Writing of his heroin addiction in the 1950s, William Burroughs noted the singular feature of the drug — with heroin the product was not sold to the consumer, the consumer was sold to the product. That heroin became the acme of twentieth century addiction was partly accidental — morphine had been the drug that doctors prescribed to addicts in ‘maintenance doses’. Following the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act (USA) in 1914 — the drugs war beginning the same year as the world war — and further crackdowns in the 1920s, maintenance dose prescription became heavily punishable, and morphine disappeared from the emerging circuit of drugs and criminality. Morphine and heroin are virtually identical, but the latter has acquired the Faustian cachet of doomed glory, while the former has largely retained its medical image. Consequently sober citizens recovering from operations can take doses of morphine that, in the cultural context of ‘pleasurable’ usage, would speed one on the road to physiological addiction.

Burroughs’ insight into the power of opiates reveals their double character. On the one hand they are the ‘omega’ drug — the external substance that more or less replicates the internal substance that does a lot of the work in controlling the physical aspects of pleasure, jouissance, release from anxiety. It was more than 150 years after the synthesis of morphine that these chemicals were identified and their name — endorphines, or endogenous morphine — establishes the cart/horse character of the relationship. It is not inevitable that such a drug will begin to move autonomously through a culture — addicting a user and then passing itself on via the user becoming a supplier — but its power is substantial. In the last decade, opium consumption in areas such as rural Burma and Afghanistan has been supplanted by the use of heroin, as poppy farmers moved to the ‘value added’ end of the market and started doing their own refining, and the surrounding communities were flooded with refined product. Blame for this lies substantially with the United States, which encouraged anti-North Vietnamese Indochinese warlords and the anti-USSR Taliban to develop heroin production as a separate funding source.

Nevertheless, heroin works best when its cultural meaning serves as an agent of addiction equal to its physiological impact. Burroughs’ was the most cogent exploration of the meaning of such addiction and the medical-punitive state apparatus which grew up around it from the 1930s onwards — but he was also an agent of its carriage, his writings presenting themselves as overtures to the transcendent revelations of the drug itself. No matter how much he, or those who followed in his wake, from Lou Reed to Irvine Welsh, dissembled about the scourge of the drug, the more talked about it became, the greater became its power. By the 1970s the bohemian values of unique self-fashioning had become mainstream values, especially of youth, and heroin’s purview became general. By 1973, $4b of it was being imported into the United States, making it the single largest consumer import commodity, and one of the economy’s most efficient multipliers, a fulcrum for the law and order, insurance, entertainment and medical industries.

In a commodity culture it is the pure commodity — demand goes off the graph because the addicted will pay anything to have it. Initially it presents itself as the anti-commodity — the nepenthe that will take one beyond desire. Subsequently all it offers is a release from the pain of its absence. Clearly all commodities do this to a degree — heroin is an illustration of the degree to which addiction is a social product. It is a fusion of our technical means to intersect with hitherto inaccessible levels of human physiology, together with the cultural promise of transcendence in a handy and easily obtainable form, whether it be, as Humphrey McQueen has shown, an opiate, a fizzy drink or just about anything else.

That it is a cultural process can be seen from the fact that it does not need a physiological substratum. Gambling, love, shopping — all start to shift towards the addictive end of the scale. Of course talk of ‘x addiction’ is partly cant and partly a medicalisation of what would hitherto have been called passion or obsession, but it may also be the mapping of a real social process — the point at which the pursuit of desire begins to lose its particular character, and become a process emptied of content.

As Philip Mendes’ following contribution makes clear, the burden of such addictions does not fall equally across society. The war on drugs is a war on the poor who are punished for living as consumers of desire in a desiring, consumer society. The federal government’s tough-on-drugs approach serves to take this a stage further. Its ideal subjects are what one might call ‘global Singaporeans’ — continent, hardworking people, imbued with a Protestant work ethic, bound by family affiliations, and aware that any step outside heavily policed social and psychological boundaries will have serious consequences for every aspect of their life. It is as much a vision shared by new Labor apparatchiks such as Mark Latham as it is a part of John Howard’s conservative fantasies. Because increasing numbers cannot be a part of that accumulating vision, they must be excluded — as an example to the others, and as raw material for a burgeoning prison industrial complex.

What global drug trade founder Warren Hastings called the ‘pernicious commodity’ — opium — is now both a mirror and means of production, distribution and exchange. A rational drugs policy will start from a recogntion of how intimately it is involved in the nature of our culture and vice versa.

The horror is occasioned not by the disease itself of course, but by the decision of the Western pharmaceutical companies — Big Pharma — to resist any attempt by governments of the South to obtain cheap generic versions of the branded medicines which are effective in slowing or preventing the development of full-blown AIDS in those who are HIV-positive. Their use of international trade legislation to attack the South African government, which is attempting to buy generics from Brazil, has laid bare to many the ahuman character of the global neoliberal order. It was ever thus in everything from cash crops to infant formula of course, but the spectacle of snatching medicines from the mouths of the dying brings into clear focus the capacity of capital to turn something into its opposite, healing into killing.

The coincident publication of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, in which he turns his attention from the cynicism and amorality of Cold War politics to the cynicism and amorality of one-world economics, only served to intensify the scrutiny of Big Pharma in the West. Faced with a public relations disaster, the explicit opposition of a number of Western governments, and the lack of enthusiasm of the Bush administration — the Clinton/Gore team had been happy to bully South Africa on their behalf — they would appear to be backing away from blanket prosecution of their global intellectual property ‘rights’.

Big Pharma argues that the prices they charge for their branded medicines — which push the price of drug-based AIDS treatments towards $20,000 a year per patient — are a measure of the extremely high costs of developing a new drug. Five-hundred-million dollars is the figure usually quoted but it is a fiction. The bulk of the costs are those created by the demands of intellectual property laws. Thousands of virtually identical compounds are tested because each can be copyrighted and used as a spoiler should a similar compound developed by a rival prove valuable. Similar treatments are created and then pseudo-differentiated for the same broad condition. An army of sales reps tours the GPs and specialists. When you add in the lavish conferences, the political lobbying and the lawyers to protect patent applications, $500 million is easy to rack up. Little wonder the ferocity with which markets are protected and forms of distribution which would undermine markets are crushed.

In light of this it has been suggested that Big Pharma should be asked to voluntarily suspend some of its patents in areas worst affected by the AIDS crisis. And so it should, but more important in the long run is to challenge the entire apparatus which maintains the notion of ‘intellectual property’.

The patent system which undergirds not only Big Pharma, but the whole biotechnology push was never developed with a view to being attached to the life sciences — to life itself. Originally established to facilitate the development of mechanical invention, this nineteenth-century knowledge industry was restricted to the visible and ‘invented’, and the notion that one could lay claim to the naturally occurring and ‘discovered’ was not entertained — otherwise the Curie family might have a claim to radium. The expansion of intellectual property to genes and chemical compounds occurred after the fact — when molecular biology had begun to develop the capacity for manipulating and transforming the material it studied. The establishment of this principle at the global level via the free-trade apparatus marks the single greatest transfer of common possession to private property in the history of the world. It’s the knowledge industry’s equivalent of the enclosures.

Yet though it is vaster in scale, its authority has come under assault in a more concerted and immediate fashion. The global and universal setting in which neoliberalism occurs makes a global and universal response more possible, and it is this enhanced capacity that has caught the corporate world by surprise. The biotechnology industry takes that process to the extreme. It is the primary agent of the ‘postmodern’ economy, in which nature itself is entirely dismembered for commodification and circulation.

Minor fiddling with the institution of patents only serves to legitimise it. The entire notion of ‘intellectual property’ as the given character of knowledge needs to be repudiated. Of course there is a need for a combination of licenses, royalties and public funding to maintain incentive and investment in knowledge development. But more importantly, nature and knowledge must be affirmed as a common and collective possession and practice. There is no need to look into the future to see what happens when this is not the case. It has already begun in Africa where one by one the hospitals are becoming hospices.

All that has now changed magnificently. Today, depression has become recognised as a key social problem now and for the future. Across the OECD, public health campaigns strive to increase awareness of the condition as an illness, to urge people to know the symptoms, to not feel shame about presenting to a GP or psychiatrist with the condition. Narratives of depression — from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation to Kay Redfield Jamieson’s An Unquiet Mind — were joined by depression subplots in mainstream TV shows such as Party of Five. In Australia, the focus on health initatives targetted five areas, one of which was depression, and this was followed up by the launch of Jeff Kennett’s mental health initiative on the area. Newspapers began to run series — such as the recent five-day extravaganza in the Age — which explored the phenomenon from all angles, and with impressive degrees of sophistication on issues such as psychotherapy versus drugs, depression and self-definition, and so on.

Suddenly it seemed everyone could quote the WHO observation — made in its Global Burden of Disease study — that depression was set to become a leading public health burden of developed countries by the year 2020. Everyone knew someone who was on Prozac, or one of the dozen or so other new generation anti-depressants. Everyone could talk about serotonin, the mysterious brain chemical that seemed to be running the show.

Indeed, as the nineties wore on, the new hyper-awareness of depression became alarming in itself. As the Prozac wave crested, it seemed as if every second person was on the drug, if only for a few months. Passages in people’s lives that would have hitherto been classed as being ‘down in the dumps’ were self-medicalised, and GPs reported many cases of people turning up and specifically requesting the drug. That the drug was helpful for many people whose depression could not be alleviated by psychotherapy alone — people whose neurochemistry had become ‘stuck’ — and for many hitherto intractable problems, such as high-repetitive obsessive-compulsive disorder (repeated hand-washing and the like), was not contested. What was in doubt was the many people who reported improvement for minor depressions that the drug was never intended to alleviate, and those who reported feeling ‘better than well’. The latter were from a depressive sub-group classed in the official manual as ‘dysphoric’ — those who had a persistent ‘endogenous’ unhappiness: one that was unrelated to external events. Many of these people — who had hitherto been regarded as substantially untreatable — responded ‘well’ to Prozac, and became substantially brighter. Many psychiatrists found this disturbing, since the definition of dysphoria as a medical condition was already controversial. Was it indeed a pathology, or simply one feature of the ecology of personalities that made up a complex society? What was being medicalised in a modernised US was a sort of personality type that would have been seen as appropriately ‘serious’ or possessed of ‘gravitas’ in another culture — such as a Scandinavian or Calvinist one. The capacity of Prozac to transform personality confounded the easy divisions that had hitherto been made between normal and pathological mood states. New anti-depressants came to market and it was realised that they treated different aspects of the overall state known as ‘depression’. Some were then marketed as a cure for ‘social phobia’ — the overwhelming hypersensitivity to negative aspects of social encounters. Many believed that such a targetting had less to do with a concerted attack on disease x or y than it did with the need to pseudo-differentiate products in a crowded market.

Yet as the prospect of a new and challenging relationship between psychiatric drugs and humanity was opening up — one in which it would be possible to shape one’s mood and personality by the use of different drugs in different combinations — the backlash began. Prozac was accused of being a contributing factor in a number of murders and suicides — charges which manufacturer Eli Lilly successfully defeated in court, or settled out of it. That the drug could tip a small number of users into sudden moods of suicidality had been acknowledged in original studies and was a documented side effect. Nevertheless the hype about the drug as a wonder substance with no drawbacks had drowned out persistent and increasing reports of frequent and widespread side effects — anxiety attacks, jitters, excess energy, sexual dysfunction and many others. By 1997 studies were beginning to show that the drug induced tolerance — meaning that discontinuation would create withdrawal effects and that increase of dosage might become necessary. In retrospect of course this is a bit of a no-brainer, so to speak — it should be obvious that any externalisation of a self-regulating system like neurotransmitters will make those drugs part of the whole system. Anyone regularly using anti-depressants is to some degree a chemical cyborg.

Yet such was the cultural desire for a ‘magic bullet’ that would blow away the blues that these obvious features of any medication were forgotten. Despite the bitter lesson of tranquilisers — the last magic bullet, and far more harmful than anti-depressants — the belief in an existential free lunch had become widespread.

In vain did psychotherapists point out that cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) — in which the client is encouraged to gradually reflect on and change negative mental frameworks and assumptions — was found to be as effective as chemicals in the treatment of depression, and that the use of CBT with medication greatly diminished many of the emotive side-effects, such as increased anger. Not only was the cultural bias tilted towards chemicals, but the economic structure of the health industry made it difficult for people to get CBT — or any sort of psychotherapy — even if they wanted it. The vast majority of people presenting with depression would be treated by a GP and no other specialist, and the bulk-billed GP’s average consultation time is adjudicated at around 10 minutes. The increasing numbers of people presenting for depression began to wear many GPs down emotionally — the last thing many were willing or able to do was to ask people to open up further.

The state of play by the end of the 1990s was better in some respects — people were increasingly capable of identifying themselves as depressed and in need of assistance — but worse in others. The public health approach to the issue had constructed depression as a sort of emotional RSI, an inevitable by-product of contemporary living. The implicit assumption was that fundamental conditions of everyday life should remain unreflected upon, and the condition isolated and treated as an individual occurrence. While this was now more sophisticated than purely physical medicalisation — the literature now speaks of depression as a ‘biopsychosocial’ problem, and identifies issues such as social isolation, stress, and so on — it foreclosed inquiry into the meaning of an increase in depression as a social phenomenon.

Furthermore, a shift in the process of self-understanding had begun to occur, with people’s reading of themselves as ‘systematic’ beings — rather than as selves or souls — starting to become a dominant mode by which behaviour is interpreted. This was not a new phenomenon of course — everyone learns to recognise the effects upon themselves of, say, drunkenness, and to distinguish between their ‘intrinsic’ and chemically induced emotions — and this sort of self-understanding is vital within a limited scope. But to give oneself over to this sort of thinking about one’s whole personality is to make it impossible to interpret any given emotion as a meaningful event? Angry? That’s a rush of adrenalin. Stressed, nervous, hunched, tired — your cortisol is out of whack. Feeling low? No, you’re serotonin deficient.

It is the last of these conditions that has become so visible, and a shorthand for the spirit of the age. People such as Tom Peters, the management guru who authored In Search of Excellence, talk of themselves as serotonin-deficient, thus turning their existential state into a physical condition — a piece of bad luck, over which he has triumphed. That the fluid, unstable, chaotic structures that he advocates for corporations and society might have something to do with his ‘deficiency’ is not explored. More critically, the UK social psychologist Oliver James talks of a ‘serotonin-deficient’ society, pointing out that people would appear to be somewhat less happy overall than they were in 1950. James’s aim is to document the way in which many features of social life which maintained people’s baseline level of contentment — social closeness, more manual labour as a component of work — have been diminished, leading to higher levels of base dissatisfaction. Much of his criticism is directed towards the enthusiastic and unquestioning adoption of hi-tech solutions by the ‘third way’ Blair government. Nevertheless the formulation of ‘serotonin deficient’ is inherently technocratic, since the frequent response may be to ‘fix’ the serotonin levels as an act independent of any contextual life change.

Art critic Robert Hughes told everyone who interviewed him at the time of the release of American Visions, his mammoth book on American art, of the depressive collapse he had suffered prior to the composition of the book, and the manner in which he used anti-depressants (and CBT) to jack himself out of it. True, in earlier times he might have used something more dangerous and damaging, such as amphetamines, or the vast amounts of coffee that Balzac drank in order to churn out work for publishers, but such substances have more of an immediate and noticeable impact — the side effects are more noticeable and a separation between self and substance more easily established. In Hughes’s case the irony of using a chemical to make meaningful a project that should have been inherently meaningful — the deep contemplation of art — seems to have been bypassed. Any question that the depression may have been bound up with the project, and indicative of a need for deeper reflection, was lost. What, one might ask, is so visionary about art if chemical alteration is required to contemplate it? What meaning does it, or anything have?

The point being ignored here — and in the public health approach to depression — is that shifting the definition of one’s mood from being ‘miserable’ to being ‘depressed’ has become a category shift, in which two competing versions of human being are ranged against each other. In some cases this may be unquestionably and absolutely valid — a hypoglycemia sufferer may fall into a sudden and major depression due entirely to a drop in blood-sugar levels, and with no external existential causes. Interpreting one’s world in the light of one’s mood in such a case would clearly be disastrous and in error.

Yet such cases are comparatively rare in the vast swathe of people complaining of depression — and often used to avoid contemplation of existential causes. Most people who have fallen into a persistent state of bleakness and inability to feel pleasure may well have fallen into a state of depression that has a specific chemical correlative — that is to say their serotonin/adrenalin levels may no longer be responsive to good events in their life. (The analogy would be that of a motor falling below a certain rpm and stalling). On the other hand, they may be in a persistent circle of what cognitive-behavioural therapists called ‘crooked’ or ‘rigid’ thinking that leads them to think of their situation as hopeless and moves them towards the state of ‘learned helplessness’ that the psychologist Marvin Seligman defined as a root condition of depression. Or they may have childhood trauma, or a genetic predisposition, or any combination of these.

The core fact is that to invite someone to recategorise themselves as ‘depressed’ is to ask them to recategorise themselves from subjecthood to objecthood. In other words the response to a condition whose principle characteristic is the absence of meaning is to have the person redefine themselves as a thing, as a point of relationship between different systems — social, chemical, linguistic, etc.

This criticism has been made before, by writers such as R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatric movement in the 1960s. But much of that work came to be seen as no longer useful due to the excessive claims that it made for a totally humanistic approach that had no biological component. The later tendency of such writers to sometimes celebrate ‘schizophrenia’ as an excessively sane response to insane social conditions was also taken up by its opponents. Despite the fact that Laing and others never ceased to insist that mental illness was frequently a tormenting condition that was in need of alleviation, the general reaction to all things sixties that set in in the late seventies swept any form of critical psychiatry into the tidybin of history. Increased findings of possible evidence of a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia — the jewel in the crown of psychiatry — gave medical and systemic models a crucial increase in legitimacy. Although many of the insights of Laing and others into the ‘politics of experience’ were incorporated into diagnosis and the practice of the psychotherapeutic session, the broader criticism of diagnosis as a political and social act was forgotten.

In the rush to establish depression as a social problem to be recognised and addressed, the surrender of full personhood has been encouraged for a variety of reasons, credible and otherwise. Pundits such as Lewis Wolpert, author of the book and TV series Malignant Sadness, have mounted substantial campaigns to frame depression as an ‘illness’, ostensibly to relieve the sense of shame felt by those who see it as individual weakness and failure. The line is that it can ‘happen to anyone’ and that it is important to pass through the experience as efficiently as possible — to cut it out of one’s life as one would remove a diseased appendix from the body. Such an approach locks in easily to a ‘human capital’ approach to self, especially in the intellectually trained professions where the minimum level of cognition and focus required for effective performance may be higher than in other spheres. The intellectually trained worker is thus a valuable piece of equipment whose continued functioning must be ensured at all costs. Increasingly businesses have become aware of the need for a flexible approach to depression and stress, largely because they’ve been losing too many highly trained and experienced staff. The intellectual property lawyer who bails out to open a muffin shop, the IT genius who takes off to ride around Australia … twenty years ago ‘burn out’ was largely restricted to professions such as advertising and social work, where the work practice entailed free-form creative and emotional responses being channelled into specific and routinised tasks. Increasingly the management of the psychological mechanisms of individual workers has become a vital task in managing the production process and business has sought to incorporate the therapeutic model into human capital management. In 1999, for example, the Business Council of Great Britain devoted much of its lobbying budget and campaigning time to persuading the government to retain tax deductible status for stress counselling and psychotherapy for work-related issues, both for the individual employee and the company providing them. Mental health had become as significant an economic issue as trade union legislation, tax regimes and the like.

The current Australian initiative is in the same mode. There was an initial fuss when it was discovered that major pharmaceutical corporations were possibly to be involved in the funding of the inquiry — in the same way that they’re involved in the funding of numerous conference and research programs across the psychiatric field, often as not focussed on the relative efficacy of chemical and non-chemical treatments — and this link was severed. Nevertheless, the personnel of the inquiry will predispose it to models of depression which are systemic and non-contextual, rather than those which have an existential and social-historical perspective. Aside from athlete Nova Peris-Kneebone and actor Garry McDonald — the latter there due to his much publicised breakdown — the personnel of the initiative is tilted towards the medical and the psychiatric. There is no philosopher, no social theorist or sociologist, no historian to give a more reflective and wide-ranging consideration of the multidimensional social phenomenon.

Whatever more immediate commercial motives some of the participants in the initiative may have, there is no doubt of the sincerity of the majority of its participants in their desire to address the issue. Yet it is precisely because their thinking about the issue is constrained within the ‘biopsychosocial’ model — depression as social problem, rather than depression as social symptom — that such initiatives threaten to be more about increasingly sophisticated processes of social control, rather than liberation. Any genuine inquiry into the complex social phenomenon known as ‘depression’ would generate a degree of reflection on social life that would question the widest possible range of assumptions.

For if there were to be any short answer to the question of the causes of the ‘depression epidemic’ the answer would be ‘just about everything’. Many of the particular features of contemporary life in information-industrial societies serve to take human beings out of their comfort zone, from sunlight deprivation to lack of muscular exercise to the increase in periods of isolation throughout the day. The neurobiological mood maintenance system evolved to predispose humans to seek out these things, and contemporary life has removed them. Closed systems of meaning — religion being the primary example — that framed life and gave a sense of imminent presence to its most chaotic aspects — have collapsed under the impact of the scientific world view. Without such legitimating overviews — and in the absence of a ‘heroic’ style left movement which would give meaning to struggle — poverty and social exclusion have come to be seen as mere and total deprivation, an unameliorable helplessness and denial of the pleasures and powers of a consumer society. The extension of the market into every aspect of life has drained everyday life of much of its particular and sensual character …

One could go on with this, but there is little need. The particular critiques of contemporary life have been widespread and generally known since the 1960s, yet they’ve received the ‘Chesterton’ treatment — found difficult and not tried, honoured more in the breach than the observance. To read a book like Earth in the Balance — Al Gore’s passionate plea for a sustainable world and its trenchant and detailed critique of instrumental rationality, you would think that the Frankfurt School had finally found their political champion — were you not aware of Gore’s record as an unfailing agent of US corporate power across the globe. The shelves of self-help books take for granted the cultural problem of the collapse of religion and the rich structures of tradition, yet authorise the belief that such meanings can be rediscovered by the use of the particular artifacts and atomised rituals of such practices. In other words it is the limitations of the tradition of classical sociology — including Marxism, and the critique it offered — that now stand in the way of the cultural dilemma of which the ‘depression epidemic’ is the harbinger.

Depression may look like an individual predicament, but this is clearly the surface structure of a deeper event — the collapse of social meaning within the depressed person. That can and does occur in most cultures. All cultures, even the most myth-girdled of kinship societies, have some concept of something like depression or spiritual disturbance — often rendered as someone ‘not being in their right head’ or a similar sort of phrase.

What may be new now is that the collapse is occuring both within and without, for larger numbers of people. If people are increasingly less bound up in each other — in networks of obligation, co-operation, familial relation — and less bound up with specific meaningful places and things, then the burden of making a meaningful world falls back wholly on the self, who is obliged to be the point at which a whole world is held together. This is now taken as second nature by most people, and an era in which one was defined largely by class, church, nation, association, order, brotherhood and so on falls away. The oft-heard phrase — ‘only you know what’s right for you’ — is a measure of this attitude, and of the contradiction it carries within it. If the only thing that makes the meaningful world for person X is that person X has chosen it from the remorseless stream of images, persons and possibilities that characterise contemporary life, then person X is caught in a process of diminishing returns. In such a precarious existential situation, the slightest stumble — a lost job, a failed relationship, the normal disappointments of everyday life — can precipitate a fall into the abyss.

The contemporary person has less of a ‘ground’ to them, and when they fall they’re more likely to fall for ever. Hence the newest and most numerous victims of the ‘depression epidemic’ are those whose selves are under construction — pre-adolescents of the ten-to-twelve-year-old range, for whom a number of anti-depressants are now manufactured in orange and lemon flavours. This is the substructure of depression as a social form, and why adversity and difficulty increasingly present themselves to people not as hardship, or as ill-fortune, or as oppression, or as woe, but as partial or total subjective collapse and shutdown.

Furthermore, the cultural cycle can be a vicious one. As more people commit themselves to the chemical technology of anti-depressants or the social technology of psychotherapy, the degree to which encounters between persons are actual encounters between situated, authentic people responding to their present world diminishes. The sense that the other may not be a present person, but a chemically transformed series of reactions adds to the general sense of social non-meaning. Once again, this is something that people understand as part of the round of social life with more visible drugs, à la the expression ‘it’s the beer talking’. The idea that psychotherapy is a ‘social technology’ is less well understood. Clearly some forms of therapy open people up to a more real and authentic relation to the world. Others — such as neurolinguistic programming (NLP) — rely on changing people’s behaviour in order to adjust them socially, without opening out to a less circumscribed relationship to the world. In that respect, the division between chemical and social techniques for social adjustment can be seen as partial. They are both processes for putting the world ‘in brackets’ as a way of dealing with problems of meaning associated with it.

The number of people for whom this process is necessary has been vastly overstated — in a social debate about depression in which every aspect of the condition has been thoroughly worked over, except that of a widespread and growing feeling of meaninglessness.

Marxist approaches — from the visionary social analysis of the 1844 Manuscripts through the sixties works of Marcuse and Fromm — have emphasised that the subjective ‘alienation’ felt by many people is an expression of the ‘objective’ alienation — of labour and self — that occurs within capitalism. But the hope that a society in which alienated labour has been replaced by free life activity will have substantially solved problems of personhood and meaning is a hope based on the assumption of a ‘whole’ human being who will leap, entire and of herself, from the alienated shell of the distorted and crushed personalities produced by capitalism. In fact a post-scarcity communist society would find the creation of meaningful frameworks of social and psychological life one of its major challenges. Marxist social critics rightly accuse psychotherapy of adjusting real human beings to an unalienated world. Yet the Marxist critique too — one that has become a staple of mainstream Sunday colour magazine treatments of such issues — fails to go deeply enough into the way our selfhood is put together by deep, abiding and irreplaceable forms of obligation and social connection. These social forms could not be maintained within a society whose sole maxim was that ‘the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all’.

Such rarefied discussion might seem abstruse in the face of this ‘biopsychosocial’ phenomenon. But if the WHO figures are correct and depression is trending upward in all postmodernising societies, then that discussion cannot be avoided forever. The scattered and fragmented social phenomenon of depression will become a, perhaps the, major social phenomenon to be addressed. Just as the natural world became the ‘environment’ in the 1960s — at the point when it was on the way to ceasing to be any sort of environment capable of sustaining life — so the ‘inner nature’ of social and psychological life will become the focus of sustained social attention when it is starting to become unsustainable on a wide scale. Like salinity carried in a river system, the problem of social meaning in a culture of hyperindividualism and disconnection deposits grain by grain until one day it is suddenly clear that the land has become salt.

This should give us pause. However those who too easily predict a coming collapse of capitalism leave themselves vulnerable to its seemingly eternal delay into a series of chronic crises and renewals. As Boris Frankel points out in his essay in this issue of Arena Magazine, left intellectuals who insist that capitalism’s collapse is around the corner debilitate themselves. This kind of apocalyptic hope cannot deal with the shape-shifting capabilities of this form of life. The market may have a terrible precariousness, but at the same time it is being constantly readjusted and reproduced.

To respond adequately we need to understand these processes. Its periodic convulsions are constantly smoothed over through new expressions of legitimation, and as these expressions wear thin, the ensuing crises have to be locally contained and smoothed over. In Australia we have seen the electoral consequences of re-using an exhausted language to reassure voters. John Hinkson argues here that the technological extension of the market into people’s lives pushes to the margins all those who are less than techno-savvy. A significant section of the public is now, in turn, rejecting the current expressions of a world from which they have been progressively excluded.

In response, other forms of control are called upon to give the sense that the nation is more than an administrative node for trade’s global flow. This control is exerted on the bodies of those who make the mistake of thinking that the ideal of security and mobility applies equally to all — for example, the figure of the refugee. For the moment, treating refugees as ‘illegal’ queue-jumpers works well to re-legitimise the idea of stable control. It is a strategy that for a time will have popular appeal, and it is a strategy that gets strange support from a new genre of television. The state in the role of vigilant regulator of the country’s borders has its popular-culture parallel in the taste for surveillance, administration and discipline in ‘reality TV’. As Simon Cooper asks — who stays on the island?

Just as the categories of ‘economy’, ‘nation-state’ and ‘society’ are presented through images under reconstruction, the sense of the ‘self’ is also being de-stabilised. Like the Japanese watcher at the window, there is now occasion to confront a less than solid vision of the self. As the market becomes an increasingly shifting glass of refracted images the consequences for us are devastating. The depression epidemic, argues Guy Rundle, is a manifestation of this kind of deep-felt ‘framelessness’. Individuals are left to re-construct themselves from a fragmentary psychological model or through the binding properties of drugs.

Alternatives to this atomised condition require seeing politics as a sustained project across every aspect of life, but possibilities could also emerge in areas that do not offer a typically political program of resistance. Despite the ubiquity of dislocation, the communicative aspect of art as a point of potentially shared meaning is one small area in which to reclaim some stability. Here we might glimpse a beginning of more thorough social change beyond art. The works of Colin McCahon and Rosalie Gascoigne (featured on the front and back covers respectively) display the way a formal cohesion can be gleaned from otherwise disparate social particles. In McCahon’s work we see older, religious frameworks restructured for newer problems of place and self. Gascoigne’s work manages to inject newly framed possibilities into life’s ephemera and detritus. It is not spiritual retrieval that is the key here, but rather the process of collecting what is left behind, the process of capturing meaning in the context of a shared and co-operative sense of the future. It is a process that might benefit the Japanese office-sitter — and the rest of us too — that is, if we can bear to drag our gaze away from the false security of the corporate window.

Matthew Ryan

That it was a political achievement is undeniable, and the event has been useful as a point at which to uncover the buried history of national debates, especially around issues of free trade and protection. But it wasn’t an achievement of the political imagination in the same way as the American or French revolutions were, or any occasion of independence in which nationhood was wrested from an oppressor, or brought together by a fusion of demands and possibilities, of the real and the ideal. To unite six colonies founded by the same imperial power on a single continent does not begin to compete with the Bastille or the Long March, and people are well aware of the fact.

The event itself was the least disruptive sort of independence possible — the declaration of limited dominion status, with continued domination by Westminster on matters of trade policy and foreign affairs, and the persistence of the Privy Council as a final court of appeal. Even the timing of the event — the first day of a new century — makes it look more like an exercise in book-keeping rather than nation-making. What was widely understood at the time to be an act of continuity with the British Empire is being retroactively redefined as the first in a chain of events whose logical conclusion is the declaration of a republic.

The ‘Federalists’ are trying to revive a sense of nationhood in the political dimension, by reminding people that part of their identity is a politically constituted one. As global neoliberalism proceeds apace — to the point where it has taken on the neutralised term of ‘globalisation’ — and party politics flows towards a unitary centre, the realm of nationhood has been driven back into the purely symbolic, and attached primarily to sport. The double whammy — the retreat of national political and economic independence, and the expansion of purely symbolic nationalism to fill the vacuum — is far from uniform. The success of One Nation — and its potential rebirth — is indicative that there are social groups for whom a sense of national identity exists in the old style, as a concrete myth fusing political history and symbols in a continuous narrative. Yet their appeal has been largely confined to a rural white population, and they have had little success in gaining a base in the industrial working class (though this will change if there is an economic downturn of any seriousness later in the year).

The ‘branding’ of Australia began in earnest in the 1970s, as a correlate to multiculturalism and the dissolution of an anglo-Celtic hegemonic culture. As other commentators here and elsewhere have noted, the ‘branding’ form of nationalism drew on a number of alleged national traits — an easygoing character, an enthusiasm for the ‘fair go’, a familiarity with striking nature — rather than on an internalised and widely shared national story. In the last decade or so it has been fused with the tourism industry for the sake of international ad campaigns, and played up as a contrast to the revived nationalisms and ethnic myths of the post-Cold war era.

Australia is, in this account, the post-national nation, a respite from the world, a place where people can relate to each other with total transparency, having rid themselves of the baggage of their ethnicity, retaining only that which is pleasantly different, such as cuisine and customs. This sense of the place as a new world destination which — unlike the US — does not impose a history of its own was behind the giddy suggestion that Sydney become the permanent venue for the Olympics, Australia as a place where the world comes to get away from itself. It was an image that was achieved only by a marginalisation of the most concrete and tragic narrative of all, that of Indigenous Australians — the masterstroke of which was the faux-naif ‘wonderland’ style of the opening ceremony.

The world as Alice, fallen into the South, where everything is upside-down and nations mock and satirise their own history at triumphal occasions — it is this sort of thing that Don Watson dubbed the ‘post-modern republic’ during his tenure as eminence brune for Paul Keating. Watson called for an ‘aleatoric, bebop’ republic, an improvised and open-ended form of national self-understanding. Such a nation would go beyond the US in identifying its character with a liberal polity — unlike the US it would not seek to impose a specific type of liberalism on individual citizens, but would foreground pluralism and respect for diverse and divergent cultural ways. The ‘Federalists’ have added a political theme to that vision which, at its most exuberant, amounts to the identification of an ‘Australian genius’ for peaceful nation-making.

Alas, Minerva’s wombat forages at night. The achievement of a post-modern nationalism occurs by the grace of a historical process which dismantles the foundations of the Nation — and the best and worst it can offer — in a fashion more comprehensive than the new nationalists realise. The global neoliberal order and its flows of capital, labour and images intersects with the self in a way that makes possible the post-modern national citizen, someone who understands their particular culture as no more than one way of being human, the equivalent of a preference for strawberry over chocolate. Yet at the same time it creates a different form of relationship between person, society, culture and nation, one in which groundedness plays less of a role.

By ‘groundedness’ of course we mean the material nature of community, not the ideal myths of Nation or Race. Social interdependence, limits to mobility and the particular nature of the locality have historically been key sources of cultural meaning and social being. Crude myths of Nation have always been ‘reverse engineered’ — a unified community invented to legitimise an existing polity. The attempt to create a non-National nation from a fusion of actually existing cultural attributes and pluralist liberal hopes is a worthier project, but one more likely to be defeated by its own paradoxes.

The cultural space within which the new nationalists seek to build can no longer be seen as a ‘wedding-cake’ structure in which a local cultural ground is overlaid with external mediated influences, be they British or American. Many core elements of social and cultural development — mass culture, curriculum, consumption — are now oriented to the development of the person as pre-globalised. Particular national identity comes as a mediated form — one’s flavour — but the core psychological structures are general and universal, the necessary hardware for global mobility and flexible work patterns. Real access to global options may vary, but the principle itself dominates aspirations, meanings and values. In fact those who gain the greatest class mobility from the process — working class children who gain a professional education — are the least likely to have any attachment to particular origins, at least in the first part of their adulthood.

This process of social development yields many paradoxical results. Those most likely to politically sympathise with the aspirations of indigenous people are those least likely to have a real and incommutable relationship to country. Those most opposed to indigenous struggles are more likely to have a — comparatively vestigial — sense of place. The desire for a grounded culture throws up absurdities, such as the search for an ‘Australian’ cuisine, in the absence of bounded cultural practices which bring cuisines into being.

On the ground, the downside of such a process is becoming increasingly visible — the combination of social-economic redundancy and cultural-psychological dysfunction. Politically, it presents us with multiple possibilities and few probabilities. As many have observed, our federal system is a fluid and open-ended form, which could be conducive to the most imaginative political developments. Currently much attention is focused on union with New Zealand — a clear mark that the relationship between culture and politics remains little understood. But there is no reason why other possibilities — the creation of new states to promote a renewed focus on regional and local economies, for example — could not come into play.

Yet there is little chance that they will. The Australian political framework resembles a cicada. The popular enthusiasm that made a constitution have now died away, leaving a constitution resistant to change, ruling a population whose identity is by and large not defined within politics. Thus Australians will stir themselves to reject an elitist model of a republic, but no subsequent positive campaign for an independently elected president takes root.

The hopes that the centenary of Federation would provide a springboard for political renewal are overwhelmingly the hopes of those who still work and think within a mindset that sees politics and history as occupying the same space. That does not mean that campaigns to re-extend the reduced scope of democracy within Australian life will not have some successes. But the causes that will move a mass of people to politics will not only be different to those of a hundred years ago — they will be of a fundamentally different form.