mardi 31 juillet 2007

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.

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“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 There also emerges in these wish images a positive striving to set themselves off from the outdated – that means, however, the most recent past.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

dimanche 22 juillet 2007

Turkish Election Results


Voters in Turkey have returned the ruling AK Party to government after today’s election handing them 341 seats in the new Parliament. Their chief rivals, the republican CHP with 112 seats and the right-wing nationalist MHP with 70 seat were left far behind. However, the victory is not without dissapointment. The ruling party remains 27 votes shy from the goal of 367 seats set by their leader as the goal for the summer election. The magic number of 367 was needed to allow the AKP to select the new President of the Republic, and to overcome the Constitional Court's clever blocking of their preferred candidate. This will set up another stand-off between the populist AKP and the holders of Ataturk’s republican revolution (i.e. the military and the Constitutional Court). The wild card in this stand-off will be the newly elected “Independents,” who with 26 seats, will act as potential kingmakers in the debate over the presidential selection. When you consider that 22 of those seats are held by the pro-Kurdish DTP, who ran as “Independents” to get around the 10% national threshold, then the upcoming battles over control of the selection of the President gets even more tumultuous (pending final results). After all, the mere presence of these DTP deputies is enough to send many hard-line Turkish nationalists call for the resumption of non-democratic measures.

However, the AKP and the DTP may need each other to fend off the right-wing nationalists and the republicans. In this case, can an AKP-DTP agrement form the basis for an agreement over the selection of the president? This will remain an open question depending on the AKP’s ability to continue its courting of the EU while also making concessions to Kurdish minority rights. Such a concialtory move would endear them both to the kingmaker “Independents” in Turkey and to the human rights activists in Europe who might hold sway over Turkey’s entry to the EU. It could be a gamble that perhaps only a party such as the AKP, which cleverly balances so many interests, can pull off. Then again the backlash in nationalist heartland of Turkey and xenophobic heartland of Europe might prove to be too much for such a bold strategy to work. In this case, all parties might resort to the cheapest form of exclusionary nationalism, in which case danger for more violence Southeast Turkey becomes an grotesque possibility.

Considered geographically, the AKP victory is quite impressive winning the largest share of the vote in most districts. The AKP received more than 60 percent of the vote in 10 central Anatolian and southeastern Anatolian cities, evidence of the strong support in the Turkish heartland. Conversely the CHP was confined to its bases in western Turkey, and was shut out of from a number of cities failing to win a deputy in 35 out of 81 cities. Even in the stronghold of Izmir they were challenged by the AKP who almost doubled their votes to over 30%, only 5% less than the CHP’s 35% total. Although the DTP gathered the most votes in many Southeaster districts, the AKP also increased their share of votes in many of those distircts, in effect taking votes from the DTP. Although it did not win as many seats as it expected, overall, the AKP was the clearly the favoured party, and this election could signal the emergence as the new natural governing party. It’s ability to coalesce various core groups could prove disastrous for the AKP’s republican foes, making the coming weeks worth following.

jeudi 19 juillet 2007

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.

mercredi 18 juillet 2007

Ottawa's New Revanchist Mayor

This November Ottawa voters chose political neophyte Larry O’Brien as new Mayor of the Nation’s Capital. To the surprise of everyone, in a stunning mi-election turaround, O’Brian emerged from relative obscurity to defeat both long-time Councilor Alex Munter as well as the incumbent Mayor Bob Chiarelli. The narrative of his dramatic victory holds that O’Brien’s amiable smile and personable demeanor endeared him the public. O’Brien’s sudden accession to the Mayor’s Chair demands asking what made him so attractive to the general electorate, and more specifically to the sub-urban, ex-urban and rural voters who made up the majority of his support?

O’Brien popularity can in large part due to his strength in promoting himself as an populist outsider and a self-built entrepreneur. Throughout the campaign Ottawa’s new mayor continuously boasted that he turned a small 35$ investment into a billion dollar global company. O’Brien rode this success all the way to city hall by extending his entrepreneurial stance to his mayoral bid. With a confident swagger O’Brien oozed a populist style and promised to provide the necessary shake-up to establishment politics and to bring a common sense approach to civic politics. The everyday-citizen was convinced by his glad-handing circus. As one elector noted: “O’Brien is one of us. He understands the everyday challenges of workers.” He proved to be the anti-thesis to the policy heavy, substantive and nuanced debates between center-right Chiarelli (read Liberal) and center-left candidate Munter.

In contrast to his foes O’Brien’s policy platform was oddly thin and mostly ambivalent to issues of municipal governance. Transit? Roads? Parks and Recreation? Social Assistance? Housing? Outreach to ethnic and community organizations? In each of these O’Brien largely had no position – and in fact skipped out on a number of town halls hosted by interested communities and interest groups. Perhaps we can excuse a political neophyte for not having a policy position on these issues, but O’Brien did not even have a position on the single largest issue of the campaign – Ottawa’s proposed LRT.

Still to understand O’Brien’s electoral triumph we need to see beyond a successful outsider campaign and old-style retail politics. O’Brien’s election show how provincial intervention in civic politics have provided a ripe ground for reactionary politics. O’Brien’s key electoral promise offered a zero percent freeze on municipal property taxes over his term proved enormously popular. Ottawa’s historically progressive electorate turned massively in the last weekend to O’Brien seemingly in support of this position.

Most of O'Brien's support could be understood as a property owning class who were reacting to past increases in property taxes and the murkey and secretive MPAC assessment process. In a cheap trick played too often by municipal politicians, O’Brien took advantage of this anger promised to end the creeping uncertainty over the cost of property ownership. O’Brien’s key promise proved very popular in the rural and suburban wards where he registered between 50% and 82% of the votes. However, O’Brien was also able to take advantage of an influx of middle-class information and knowledge workers into the city center who had also changed the voting sensibilities of the city center. Such “mercenaries of cultural urbanity,” as Keil (2000) has dubbed them have imported a perspective that supports an odd combination of pro-public (transit and recreation) and anti-public (policing, property taxes) policies. These were sufficient in number to bring O’Brien enough city center votes to win the election handily. Added to his healthy sub-urban, ex-urban and rural base these city center votes gave O'Brien 10% more total votes than his closest rival.

Yet, in contrast to what his campaign promises might suggest and to his level of support, O’Brien is not a suburbanite nor an outsider. O’Brien is a consummate insider domiciled in the exclusive enclave of the über-powerful in downtown Ottawa: the lavish condominiums of 700 Sussex Drive. O’Brien is not a convert to city-living nor to the pro-public residents who have long-campaigned for affordable housing, social services and the mixes character of their neighbourhoods. In his other major policy proposal, O’Brien promised to clean the city center from the panhandlers and provide the city with more policing. This pronouncement indicates how O’Brien is as part of the “revanchist class” (Smith, 1996) of city-dwellers who hold a pointed disdain for the disorder of city-life who hold that the evils of city-life can be brushed away by the school of hard-knocks and a dash of entrepreneurialism and a can-do attitude, and moral rectitude.

Cleary O’Brien was able to exploit the rural/urban, suburban/urban, property owner/renter cleavages that were emerging from amalgamation of areas with radically different service needs. In this sense, O’Brien victory is the culmination of the forced amalgamation of the suburban cities, rural townships and old City of Ottawa in 2000, and the takeover of city politics by suburban and rural interests. In many ways O’Brien’s victory mirrors how successive waves of neoliberal governments have supported one-class of city-region dwellers over others, and how government support for new urban policy has provided support for revanchist cultural mercenaries. In this case, O’Brien’s everyday-life is a model Ottawa's acceptance of private-public partnerships and city center embourgeoisiment.

First, lets take his home. The condominium at 700 Sussex was built by Claridge Homes with the willing assistance of the National Capital Commission. Under the terms of the private-public partnership, the NCC facilitated the development by leasing expropriated land it had held vacant since the mid-eighties to Claridge Homes and by helping guide development and manage the conceptual stages of the project. By expropriating and demolishing, and then holding the land for a decade and providing the land for lease under favourable market conditions, the NCC has acted as the ultimate public facilitator of private property development and city-center embourgeoisiment.

Second, it is important to take a closer look at his business. Ottawa’s high-tech sector was largely driven by public investments, most significantly R&D money from DND: not that is some can-do know-how! Of course one might ask if garnering public support for private enrichment is entrepreneurial or simply using public purse strings to achieve private goals.

O’Brien had taken his bring his guy-next-door circus to City hall. How will he understand the role of government in providing city services? How will he tackle issues of housing and social services? Who will he support and will exclude? So far the kind of entrepreneurial approach and city-center lifestyle O’Brien has embraced equates public support for an exclusive and revanchist elite politics.

I challenge the Mayor to go beyond his entrepreneurial past and truly be a populist who listens to the needs of the all residents and especially to those who are in dire needs of government support and initiative.