Analogue Asylum

The recent re-emergence of violent protest at the Christmas Island detention centre and of self-harm generally within the detained refugee population threatens Carbon Tax’s monolithic presence in the domain of Australian political discourse and allows a certain archetypical feature of the local landscape to rear its head yet again, one much closer to our traditional history: the issue, not of how we treat our environment, but of who we are willing to share it with. The popularity that could be (re)gained (by whom, I wonder...) through using this opportunity to change the focus of the public’s attention is not of interest to me here. Rather, this issue draws upon how humanity can be changed into a resource; the ramifications extend well beyond the immediate political sphere. These things are happening on the coast, the limit, the margin.

In Dark Writing Paul Carter explores the notion of coastline as ‘a form of reasoning that, in principle, applie[s] to the conception of any place defined in terms of the accumulation of resources and the regulation of access to them.’ (p. 65) The very nature of the coastline is to delineate the land to be possessed. However, this barrier also affects a kind of transmutation of the things crossing it; the change can be subtle, however. The critique begins with him ridiculing ‘[t]he strange rituals associated with quarantine stations’ (p. 65) of the past:

‘[I]n Malta, letters from infected zones were “dropped in vinegar, and then put into a case, and laid for about a quarter of an hour on wire grates, under which straw and perfumes had been burnt.” There were different methods of “expurgation” for different classes of goods. In Venice, wool, flax, feathers, and similar materials were aired for forty days by removing them from their containers and mixing and turning over the heaps twice a day by porters working with hands and arms bared. Woollen and linen clothes were periodically unfolded and refolded and sometimes hung on a cord for better exposure to the air. Furs, considered especially dangerous, were, we learn, “very often waved and shaken.” Articles like beeswax, sponges, and candles were purged by immersion in salt water for forty-eight hours. Salted hides, salts, and minerals, however, were considered non-infectable.’ (p. 67)

That these bizarre customs which enjoyed, I’m sure, the full fruits of scientific sanction (indeed, the scientific discovery of the bacterium legitimated and authorised, in many ways, quarantine) were performed and thought efficacious is not really problematic. It does, however, betray the sometimes arbitrary nature of quarantine and indeed of the border itself. While various goods mightn’t’ve noticed their ordeals, humans were much more prone to. ‘Temporary inmates of these places suffered, as a Parisian architect confined for sixteen days at the quarantine station of Malta in 1833 wrote, “un ennui mortel.”’ (p. 67) They were stuck playing musical instruments, chatting, sketching, hiring chefs to enjoy their food and drink, and playing cards; anything just ‘to temper as far as possible the feeling of depression and boredom.’ (p. 67) Obviously, the luxury of travel (and the not-so-luxurious necessity of quarantine) was only afforded to the very rich who could expend wealth to ensure that they were not overly bored by these temporary sojourns. This is in stark contrast to the people who are detained in our modern iteration of this quarantine. More often than not completely destitute, their lot is not that of fine food and enforced leisure but of appalling immobility and existential frustration. Even if today’s mandatory detainees did have means to entertain themselves, while the harm would seem to be minimised, the fundamental issue here would not be done away with. The riots of the refugees express how it feels to go digital...          

The sea forms waves. It persists as an archetypical symbol of the unconscious: mysterious, unobtainable, powerful. Nothing comes from the ocean divorced from that ambiguity; nothing goes to the ocean without paying its dues: ancient sailors offering up sacrifices to avoid shipwreck. Is it from this that mandatory detention protects us? The coastline ‘digitizes the analog [sic] turbulence of the sea, progressively sampling its wave forms until nothing is left of their movement power. And the same applies to the human movement; filtered through this maze of posts, it loses its power to produce change.’ (p. 66) An entity changed to a changeless thing. It is interesting to note the changes that occur, in any case. These coastlines were established in older times to protect ‘coastal visitors [who] were vulnerable to all kinds of fall – intellectual, spiritual, moral... [I]n the interests of public well-being and civil order, passage across that debatable land needed to be stabilized. Unreliable waves, shifting sands, unpredictable natives, and enigmatic interiors needed to be policed. This was the function of the coastline, to cordon off an in-between zone and to bring its labyrinth of possibilities within the prisonhouse of reason.’ (p. 71) We see that the rationalisation of the land that was enforced through quarantine, the stabilisation of passage/entry, protected those incoming from on otherwise savage and unpredictable place. Now, however, the place is civilised but those incoming are not. The land has been transformed – it is now logical and rationalised – and those who come need not be protected from a fall but are already fallen (queue-jumpers, smuggled, trafficked). We are protected from them. Those who come seeking asylum are faced only with the “prisonhouse of reason” and, let us be very clear, this is not the detention centre, but the society in which we live. The citizenry they wish to join are the prisoners; we are those who are willing to treat other humans – and ourselves no less – as digitalised bits of information/material. We are now fallen; the original quarantine failed.

Invoking the name of the queue-jumper is not to be done light-heartedly; this term carries heavy baggage around with it. Yet why is jumping the queue seen in such a negative way? In our post-Enlightenment era of reason and rationality it seems to go against the very notion of equality (even if it is itself fundamentally unequal – favouring the “first in” and the “best dressed”) which is such a central tenet of our liberal world. Think of the lines at banks, cinemas, nightclubs; everywhere the queue snakes its way, turning at acute angles, folding back over itself. This form of place making has a distinct effect: ‘Every step was taken to defer arrival, to keep the stranger walking backwards and forwards more or less on the spot. It is no accident that check-in counters of every kind use the same barrier system today. The object is the same: to transform the crowd into a linear queue, and to substitute for the protocols of meeting the discipline of waiting.’ (p. 67) So a ritual procession of subjects (in the sense of those subjection to the sovereign – that is to say, an object) is engendered over the notion of a “communion of subjects” (in the sense opposite sense of self-creation and inter-subjectivity). Here we are reminded of, amongst many other things, uBuntu and the trace leads on to ethics and elsewhere. ‘The coastline digitized and froze movement.’ (p. 68) This was done for Reason – and Carter makes the architectural connection here: one can ‘classify the make-believe charades of the lazaretto – and the no less arcane and cruel diversions of the border post, the immigration hall, and the customs house – as failed forms of sociability. But there is no doubt that these zones in which the ordinary ebb and flow of everyday life is artificially cut up and frozen are congenial to reason. Their proliferation of walls, doors, and barred prospects, and the new class of janitors appointed to look after them, find their counterpart in the philosopher’s desire to see every step of a logical argument.’ (p. 68) These doors are two faced, just as the patron god of the janitors who maintain them is. The mindless walking back and forth in the line, when coupled with this image of enclosed spaces and “barred prospects” reminds me immediately of a tiger or other zoo-held animal, pacing its cage nervously – the failed forms of sociability overflowing from the rational, reasonable, logical world of the West into other spheres: the natural, the irrational, the fluid, the alien. All around us is a victim of our help.

Seeing the queue for asylum in this way, we can now perhaps better understand the dissatisfaction ad outright rage expressed by the detainees; here is a tiger who can set fire to his or her enclosure. The human impact of policies of rationalisation/digitalization must again be emphasised. But this is exactly the point; we deal with the human. To treat the human as animal/material would simply be to repeat the reductionist error of the agents of incarceration; to say that the human, like the tiger, yearns for some kind of freedom (and this must surely be traced back to the natural/authentic state) and will do damage (to others, to themselves, to their environment, etc.) until this is achieved would miss the point. The human, unlike the tiger, does not need freedom. Not only this, but he or she does not need freedom to be free. Humans live in cells of their own construction, often built by virtue of the very freedom they have which they dare not face. We can do better than the tiger; we can do better than slinking from corner to corner of our little box because we had the unfortunate fate of meeting someone with bigger claws and louder roars. Great freedom can be found inside a very limited space indeed. ‘Here in the solitude of the cell, the author of Le Contrat Social could see the origin of society.’ (p. 69) Just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw detention as an opportunity to refine his ideas; so too did Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, Mikhail Bakunin, and even Hitler use their times of confinement and solitude as opportunities for intellectual elucidation and empowerment. Yet we can do even better than this, for it is exactly this kind of clarification which is problematic. While in this case being applied to ideas rather than individuals, the damage done is the same in kind, the slow (inevitable?) digitalization of the analogue.

What, then, can we do? Well, we can not know what to do. This is the place to which you must (re?)turn before you can honestly start in any particular direction. How can you honestly evaluate the options if you already know what to do or, even worse, have already invested yourself in a particular path? When one is not alone but with some grouping, this approach can make ‘“not knowing what you are doing” a source of solidarity rather than weakness.’ (p. 113) A great example of this is displayed by Carter through this sketch:

L. R. Fitzmaurice, "Messrs Fitzmaurice & Keys Dancing for their Lives"

It is a drawing of two individuals who are forced to recognise that they do not know what to do and, in some final act of desperation and communion, they dance. It is at this juncture, then, that the waves of sound, the whole digital/analogue dichotomy, can finally be seen in relation to music and the dance. The human form is one that is constituted by and in vibration, rhythm, change. We’re stuck on the coastline, in quarantine, and we don’t really know what to do... so we (think we) can dance. We’re a step above simply walking to and fro in our cages, we dance and song [sic?] our way around.

So I pirouette away leaving this (mis?)quote from proto-feminist (amongst other things) Emma Goldman unravelling in the wake of my departure:

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.