Closing E.B. Eddy

A Benjaminian Excise of the Tragedy of the E.B. Eddy Plant

On July 31, 2007, the century old dream of an industrial heartland in the Ottawa Valley was dealt a final blow. Domtar Corp. the owner of the historic E.B. Eddy plant announced the closure of the last remaining plant on Chaudière Island. An epoch had finally come to an end. The slow and steady decline had met its terminal point. Forest would no longer be transformed into a cashable commodity by the practiced hands of unionized labour.

For over a century, over a large geographic area stretching far into the Upper Ottawa Valley, lumber had been transported to Chaudière Island to be transfigured from one form to another. Squared logs, timbers, pulp, had all been transformed and metabolized by the labour of the workers and by the energy of the Falls into a commodity to be bought and sold on international markets. Now, we are told by the Captains of Canadian Industry, Chaudière timber is no longer a saleable commodity. The timber fibres are a relic of the past.

The debris of the messy past will soon be cleared out to form a neat natural image and a new wish image. The new utopia will fit neatly into the clean and crisp image of a green capital city. The Chaudière Falls, like LeBreton Flats, will be cleansed of its past, yet like all epochal shifts, the break will not be clean. The traces of past images will be recycled into the new dream embodied in the physical structures of buildings and in the ephemeral celebrations on its grounds. Ye olde plant will become the festival site for consumption where national culture and global tourism will now, in the place of paper, be manufactured. However, this new national storage of memory will be performed as a class-less memory void of the trials of the workers of the Flats. The memory of the Chaudière Falls is to store a national story of regeneration void of tragedy.

****

“To the form of the new means of production which is the beginning is still dominated by the old one (Marx), there correspond in the collective consciousness images in which the new is intermingled with the old. These images are wish images, and in them the collective attempts to transcend as well as to illumine the incompleteness of the social order of production. There also emerges in these wish images a positive striving to set themselves off from the outdated – that means, however, the most recent past. These tendencies turn the image fantasy, that maintains its impulse from the new, back to the ur-past. In the dream in which every epoch sees in images the epoch that follows, the latter appears wedded to the elements of ur-history, that is, of a classless society. Its experiences, which have their storage place in the unconscious of the collective, produce, in their interpretation with the new, the utopia, that has left its trace behind in a thousand configurations of life from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions.” Walter Benjamin

Caché (Haneke)

Michael Haneke’s latest masterpiece Caché carefully but subtly unveils the tragedy of past(s) forgotten. Haneke’s succeeds in keeping the audience in suspense as to what exactly is hidden. At the same time, Haneke succeeds in reminding the viewer that near the placid surface of contemporary Parisian bourgeois intellectual life bubbles the threat of extreme violence (and that la République continues to suffer from a suppressed colonial moment)

The main protagonist in this unsettling tale is television host Georges Laurent played by Daniel Auteil. Laurent leads a seemingly idyllic life alongside his equally successful and cultured wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their son Pierre. In the opening sequence, the eerily placid shot of Parisian street is disrupted when we discover that the opening sequence was in fact a surveillance video of the couple’s chic-modern home at the heart of the old métropole. The quiet historic building where the family conducts its private affairs and their bourgeois comfort is quickly ruptured. Violence, or rather, the threat of violence, becomes the moment déclancheur which will keep the audience suspended, and sets the pace, and intellectual tour-de-force of the film. As the deeper layers of this thriller unfold, several encounters point to the frayed edges of the liberal mores of le nouveau régime de la République.

A sequence of video’s of their home, post-cards to George’s work and Pierre’s school indicate the voyeur is familiar with the Laurent family’s vie quotidiene.

In one such trangression the couple entertains their cosmopolitan guests in their book-adorned dining room, a third video arrives. This time the banal disruption of the smooth interior spaces strikes at the heart of la nation: its liberal intellectuals; its food; its salons; the very identity-foundations of La République. Puzzled, none seems able to explain this series threats to his interior safe-spaces: home, work, school.

Without full disclosure to his closest ally in the social contract, Anne, Laurent runs around trying to locate the author of this threat to modern life. It seems that George’s deep set memory has been tipped off by a bloody dream – giving him a hunch to search for a old childhood acquaintance in an HLM. At this moment we get a glimmer more than a the mere threat of violence to the private lives of a cast of the French intellectual bourgeoisie, but that what needs to uncovered it Laurent’s relationship to the “other” forgotten underclass. This becomes clearer in a key tête-a-tête with his ailing and distant mother.

Dialogue

When his mother speaks it is if time is suspended through the marvel of cinema. Time and space collapse and we are brought immediately to that colonial moment. A moment of clarity emerges from the fog. The deep-seated nature of his discomfort emerges: it is in the words of Kristin Ross about the inner colonization of everyday-life. For a fleeting moment the extreme violence associated with maintaining the security of home and la patrie is exposed.

This is again recalled when George makes another visit to the HLM exploding into the apartment with violent resolve. He wields his white-power privilège and threatens his "other" with his own unequivocal threats of violence. Yet, the massive racist, selfish rejection has o never seen by the self. Laurent, just like his class of upper cadres, failed in this instance as in every other, to understand why he is targeted. It seems completely illogical to them. Yet, it was a familar aller-retour of the violent colonization their class had perpetrated in Algeria and during their return to France as post-war planners. In this context, Georges rejection was part of inner colonization of everyday life that was dispersed and built into the urban fabric.

As Kristin Ross explained in her brilliant book Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, the technocratic new French state’s incipient colonization of everyday life is in itself directly linked to the process of de-colonization. As Ross noted (1996: 77) "To evoke the colonial situation here is not gratuitous; I want to suggest that in the roughly ten-year period of the mid-1950’s to the mid-1960’s – the decade that saw both the end of the empire and the surge in French consumption and modernization – the colonies are in some sense “replaced” and the effort that once went into maintaining and disciplining a colonial people and situation becomes instead concentrated on a particular “level” of metropolitian existence: every-day life (1996: 77)." The transfer of colonial political economy to the household what she calls “controlling domesticity,” is part of the dual process of modernization and decolonization. A well-run and quality domestic environment has a major influence on the “physique and health of the nation.” Much of this process of “washing the nation” and cleansing the French nation from its history of colonialism applies to the domestication of political economy that is part of the consolidation of the new national (French) middle-class to absorb the dangerous classes. The impenetrable membrane of domestic (home) and national (nation) modernization also denies colonialism and attempted to separate colonialism as extraneous force thus providing the basis for the “neo-racist conscensus of today.” As Ross argues this, “logic of exclusion has its basis in the ideology of capitalist modernization,” and the exteriorization of Algeria, the interiorization of life and the “cleansing” of French modernization.

Ross reminds us that the colonial moment exists at every moment; that our privilège and modern domestic comfort is built on an inner colonization that is completely ubiquitous to western liberal-capitalism.