On Photography - Piss Christ and Kulturkampf

I don’t believe in culture. Don’t believe artists produce it, for example, or that television advertisements create it. Analysis of culture, for example from a marxist perspective on capitalist monopolies, or from an epidemiological perspective on the causes of violence, require some initial leap of faith: you have to believe in culture as deterministic, cause and affect, a mechanism, or a force-field, when there is scant evidence of any of those.

In many theoretical perspectives culture is presented as a fog that needs peering through, an organisational chart, a guided tour rather than a lived experience. The word is a handy generalization, sure. You can look at the edges, borders and overlaps between geographies, histories, circumstances, and what those might have in difference or in common. But boundaries, epistemologies and zeitgeists are fluid, liminal, shifting, and no great help for getting to the heart of what's inside.

It would be dishonest, though, to leave what are popularly called the culture wars out of a discussion of modern photography. Conjoining culture and war leaves an impression in my mind of...something shapeless and vague, shadows in twilight perhaps, or Goya's giants endlessly bludgeoning each other.

Thinking about this is further complicated by the strategy I’m using that follows  Elaine Scarry’s critique of aesthetic critiques in On Beauty And Being Just. I’m using beauty in the sense of notability, like that black eye is a real beauty, or (from football) what a mark, you beaut!. Something notable, in other words, rather than something of beauty in the ordinary sense of being pleasing to the eye. Elaine Scarry wrote:

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.
and
The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.
(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)

Both arguments are in play in consideration of Andres Cerrano’s photograph Piss Christ. The photograph itself is described here, the artist’s website is here. I didn’t see the photograph when it was exhibited. I’m not familiar with the artist’s work, methods or rationale, or the series of photographs of objects in fluids of which it is part. My interest here is solely in the idea that its exhibition in Melbourne is storied as an engagement in a larger war of and on culture.

It will be no help referring to European statesman Otto Von Bismarck's difficulties with Catholicism in 1870s Western Europe, or referencing early twentieth century Italian Marxism, or the 1933 Säuberung.

I want to leapfrog those ideas into recent experience, into modern Melbourne. A further complication for me is some ideas from the study of macro economics. I have no background in the study of economics at all, but I am going to borrow ideas about exchanges from discourses on macro economics. My (limited) understanding is not all exchanges have to do with money, some are to do with ideas and associations and even making friends, but nevertheless play their part in a whole that is often, but not always, described as an economy.

The facts are straightforward. Pre publicity for an exhibition of Andres Cerrano’s photographs at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 saw the photograph or its description included in prominent print and electronic media. The Catholic Church in Australia sought an order preventing the photograph from public display at the gallery in the Victorian Supreme Court, arguing precedents in both Canon and Common Law on blasphemous libel.

The Catholic Church argued "Both the name and the image Piss Christ not only demean Christianity but also represent a grossly offensive, scurrilous and insulting treatment of Christianity's most sacred and holy symbol. It is calculated to outrage the feelings of Catholics and other Christians."

The National Gallery of Victoria argued the photograph had been the subject of a television documentary, published in newspapers and books and its exhibition would not add to any perceived offence against the Catholic Church.

The Victorian Supreme Court rejected the application as having no foundation in law, and found no legal basis to prevent the exhibition.  "A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel," the court decided.

In the week after the exhibition opened the photograph was vandalised twice, leading to the arrest of three men, two of whom had acted in concert. Concerned that it could not prevent such determined attacks, gallery management closed the exhibition.

Using the term ‘calculated’ to describe the production and exhibition of this image places ideas about determinism, conspiracy, authenticity, and deception on the table. To paraphrase: blasphemous libel is a wrong social arrangement. In labelling the photograph art, including it in an exhibition, making it on object of sustained regard, the gallery is a willing accomplice to, or alternatively an unwitting element in, an overarching - devilish perhaps - subterfuge.

Holding the photograph in high regard certainly led to attempts to destroy it. But there is no evidence to support the existence of a calculating, conspiratorial, organized enemy force, no sign of an evil empire poised to make revolution for or against ideology, national self-determination or even religion. If it really were an engagement of a culture war there are no visibly organised protagonists beyond a few  ivory towers blasting away at each other’s values at megaphone volume.

The photograph did not produce a force field that compelled individuals to act in these ways. The artist didn’t produce a predetermined train of events. With no epidemiology of violence to trace, and no rapacious capitalist to blame, or media personality to boycott, the episode has become a muted controversy over artistic and curatorial freedom. But it is explicable in terms of spontaneity and self-organisation, terms often used to describe market economies and a free exchange of goods, or in this case ideas.

Arguments for and against exhibiting the work became more sophisticated. The second act of vandalism was more determined and certainly more complex, and through use of distraction and concurrent action, demonstrably more innovative than the first. These might not be predicted in theories of culture, but they are predicted and comprehensible in theories of markets. I guess the absence of any concrete transaction, for example money for service, undermines an economic perspective. But call the events a series of exchanges, rather than transactions for profit, with outcomes the result of self-organisation rather than any centrality of planning, and you get a glimpse of a free population testing, contesting, reformulating, rejigging, muddling through, as one economist I read put it, one way and another, the limits of its own freedom.

It just might be, from a secular Australian perspective,  that is all the culture wars are.

The last post in this series is here

On Photography - damned either way

Public interest in wrong social arrangements are the heart of most photographic controversies.

Two images come to mind in particular that illustrate tests of public interest,  one far too ordinary, the other not ordinary enough. Both were said, by contemporaries, to distract from, or amplify, somehow, wrong social arrangements.

There is a photograph archived in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, of  Alexandra Feodorovna, Anastasia and Olga Nikolaevna bathed in light, women of the Russian royal family in 1915, seemingly unposed.  The family are busy with needlework, one has her feet up, relaxed, ordinary, familiar even: there is a wrinkled rug in the foreground.  It feels candid, unforced, intimate, real, a photo from a family album, although it is not any more.  It is a moment and a history all at once, and now part of a greater story the library's collection frames - revolution, dislocation, suffering, murder. But perhaps "rare" is a somewhat misleading description: after the Soviet Union disbanded an estimated 150, 000 photographs of the Russian royal family were discovered in secret government archives, suppressed,  in the public interest, from public view by their communist successors for nearly 100 years

There is a photograph of film star Julia Roberts by Mario Testino for a L'Oreal cosmetics advertising campaign in 2010, happy, bright-eyed and unblemished. The photograph  and advertising campaign was banned by the British Advertising Standards Authority after complaints from Scottish  Liberal Democrat member of parliament Jo Swinson that the images were digitally altered, and "not representative of the results the product could achieve." Swinson is a long time campaigner against what she describes as overly perfect and unrealistic images of women in magazines and advertisements.

Communist political parties are, of course, long time campaigners against royal families. But it seems to me that the absence of any regal trappings in the photograph, the ordinariness of the setting and the commonplace and all too human appearance of the Russian royal family posed the greatest threat to the new russian ruling class.  Demonising a ruling elite is one thing. Disappearing women that look like someones sister, aunt or wife is something else altogether. The humanity of the women that belies perceptions of wrong social arrangements had to be disappeared as well.

In modern times it is "overly perfected and unrealistic images of women", and the "deification of beauty", that must be disappeared. Photographs of supermodel Christy Turlington and actress  Rachel Weisz have also disappeared from English magazines. Ms Swinson told the UK Daily Mail  there was sound medical evidence that faked - airbrushed or photoshopped -  images cause harm. "There needs to be much more diversity in advertising – different skin colours, body shapes, sizes and ages."

What was ideologically impermissible somewhere a century ago is essential to the public interest somewhere now. In parts of the world such contradictions are avoided by suppressing images of human bodies altogether. In Western tradition, the human body is central to our humanist  heritage and what we think and say about ourselves, although depictions of it are often contested.


Upon the Protestant reformation the Catholic Church compiled and circulated huge lists of forbidden books, and demanded the censorship of painting:

... all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust...

Seventeenth Century poet, polemicist and propagandist John Milton is often quoted arguing against clerical censorship:

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties (1644)

Ironically, by 1744, Samuel Johnson was observing that a century of democratization of writing and publishing had rendered traditional systems for evaluating their worth shambolic. It was easy to publish and obtain books but difficult to trust their contents.

There are echoes of Johnson's world-weariness in controversies on photography today, and echoes of the old religious and political dogmas in conversations about them. Ironically, it may be that the failure of both religious dogma and political ideology to solve problems of wrong social arrangements that keep those controversies relevant.


The Australian Christian Lobby argued

...it is problematic to measure community standards by the number of complaints generated by a a particular broadcast or telecast. It would come as news to a great number of people within the community to learn that their view of the contemporary media environment was judged solely on their formally complaining...  (2011 Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee Inquiry into the Australian film and literature classification scheme pp10)


Historian Ross Fitzgerald wrote in the Canberra Times

...the fact that an image or a bunch of words may offend someone and is therefore a reason to ban or severely restrict them is a Draconian and intolerant position. I'm offended by lots of things these days - Question Time, alcohol and cigarettes sold in supermarkets, reality TV and religious fundamentalism - but I don't use this as a reason to try to ban these things merely because it's just my opinion.

A very modern case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - An Angry Country?

Much has been written about the 2008 seizure of Australian artist Bill Henson’s photographs, and their subsequent restoration to his Sydney dealer, innocent, along with the artist, of overwrought allegations against them.

Child protection campaigners labelled Henson’s images of a nude thirteen year-old pornographic. Art critics argued the images were, well, art. Ultimately the independent Office of Film and Literature Classification gave the images a PG (Parental Guidance advisory) classification, and State prosecutors advised the child pornography charges against the artist would not succeed.

Watching an art gallery’s contents emptied into a truck on television I was grateful to whoever had thought the operation through: the police seizing artworks weren’t visibly armed. Later, as Henson’s photographs disappeared from the walls of Australian public spaces I wondered for how long?

There is, rightly, a great deal of sympathy and support for child protection campaigners. And like any other special interest involved in the political process those campaigners are expected to vigorously prosecute their agendas. However, as noted by sociologist Frank Ferudi and others, populist policy actors of all colours who adopt child protection agendas as their own simply cannot be trusted to act upon anything except self-interest, in the end. There have been some notable witch hunts in modern times that have ended without any beneficial outcomes at all, save for the self-advancement of those involved.

Worse, rapists have had their sentences cut, and victims brought to tears and bewilderment as newspapers seek to increase circulation with name and shame gambits. Criminal investigations, especially those involving crimes against children, have not been well served by regimes of continuous speculation. And there is evidence - for example the labelling of corporations as pedophiles - that the current panic over child protection serves only the political ends of ivory towers. Frank Furedi wrote:

Mention the word ‘child’ and people will listen. Raise the moral stakes by claiming that a ‘child is at risk’ and people will not just listen but endorse your demand that ‘something must be done’. For instance, campaigners against poverty understand that they are far more likely to gain sympathy for their cause by focusing attention on what is now called ‘child poverty’. It is as if abstract socio-economic injustices are simply not compelling enough on their own terms: they have to be recast as something afflicting children

Spiked Editor Brendan O'Neill writes: 

Everyone treats the ideal or at least the word freedom seriously. Everyone pays lip service to it...This does not mean, however, that freedom as a lived experience is not under threat. It absolutely is. Many of our core freedoms, especially freedom of speech, are being undermined by a political class that doesn’t trust us to live freely. But here’s the thing: such is the value still attached to the idea of freedom that now even attacks on freedom get dressed up as an expansion of freedom. Even the killing of freedom is disguised as freedom.

It seems fair to say that contemporary Australian creatives: artists, photographers, writers, publishers, film makers, polemicists, poets, and their audience, regard each other with suspicion. Photographs, web pages, television programs, newspaper articles, internet cartoons, broadcast pranks, speeches and even privately expressed opinions have all been discussed, dissected, boycotted, divested and otherwise sensationally prosecuted during the past few years.

There is a mood to compel the media to act for the public good, an expansion of media regulation to include public interest tests put to parliament (but defeated), a looming general election contested in part on issues of public interest and in part upon issues of free speech.  Where once free speech and public interest seemed inextricable, polemic is inexorably wedging them apart.

Newspapers’ circulation has fallen off a cliff.  Newspaper journalism is routinely outsourced overseas, our commercial TV networks are two-thirds owned by foreign banks, our commercial radio networks caught in spirals of cost-cutting and falling audiences. And Australians have turned their collective backs on government-approved and financed Australian films.

It is as if people can only bear to see and hear what is already known and agreeable.

The speed at which issues are churned online is overtaken only by the almost instantaneous coagulation of opinion around them. The occasional scholarly article lamenting, for example, media coverage of climate change issues, is liked and twittered and decontextualized and resignified at breakneck speed, contested and deconstructed and decried at length and likely to be of historical interest only long before any old fashioned op-ed or editorial response appears in the next edition of a daily tabloid or weekend broadsheet.

The sclerotic nature of internet discourse has been noted by many, an interesting counterpoint to what is  otherwise imagined as fluid lines of communication. To venture an opinion, for example on a blog, is to risk deletion. Anything you say can be held against you. Simultaneously, anything you say can be turned into something else - fixed! Somehow, it all seems to make sense, even if your original post had nothing to do with cats.

Durning the past few years Australians have campaigned for sackings, boycotts, internet filters, seizures, closures, divestments, damages, apologies, corrections, and even arrests over cultural artefacts, published words, pictures, videos, sounds, that for one reason or another became controversial. Alongside the large mass media outlets other, lesser, publishers have come under pressure: notably film festivals but also art dealers and even the management of assorted privately owned and operated public venues, like those hired for controversial Dutch politician Gert Wilders and British climate-change sceptic Lord Monckton.

But while there is a mood to allow the display of those publications, artworks, photographs, books, magazines, films, ideas, only if they are in the public interest, there is next to no clarity about what the public interest might be. Outrage has replaced clarity in so much of public discourse we can start to think about crossing out lucky and substituting angry in front of country.

At the very moment the freedom of unlimited communication beckons we rush to shackle ourselves in chains of mindless rage.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - Eyes In Skies

There is a scene in Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner which goes something like this:

Deckard: (pretending to be from the American Federation of Variety ArtistsConfidential Committee On Moral Abuses)  Oh yeah. I'd like to check your dressing room if I may.
Zhora: For what?
Deckard: For, uh, for holes.
Zhora:  Holes?
Deckard:  You'd be surprised what a guy would go through to get a glimpse of a beautiful body.
Zhora: No, I wouldn't.

Although it seems a little redundant to say so, the AustralianOffice of The Information Commissioner says there is a high level of community awareness of the use of surveillance cameras in our public places.

Former Assistant Privacy Commissioner Mark Hummerston says it is difficult to offer a single, consolidated figure of the number of surveillance cameras in Australia.  There are already 53 fixed surveillance cameras and 2 mobile camera-equipped vans operating in public places in central Melbourne alone.  Last year the Victorian State Government offered Melbourne local councils three million dollars to install more. At 30,000 dollars each, that’s an extra 100 to add to the unknown quantities already installed in public places.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance told ABC news last year “There’s a study out of the UK which shows, certainly in London, surveillance cameras have been responsible for solving one crime for every thousand cameras.” The Victorian Government recently ordered Victoria Police to audit the number and type of surveillance cameras in the State.

Despite Australian national privacy principles requiring that, where practicable, consumers must have the option to transact anonymously, every Melbourne taxi, automatic teller machine, train, tram, bus is camera equipped and many retailers photograph their customers. The Office of The Information Commissioner says concerns about surveillance cameras include misuse of stored photographs or videos, loss of anonymity, discomfort about being watched and the effectiveness of surveillance cameras achieving  their stated goal of crime prevention. Around eighty percent of people responding to surveys about surveillance cameras expressed no concerns about them at all. Five percent were 'very concerned.'

Last year the Melbourne Age newspaper bemoaned the spread of surveillance cameras as undermining “the sense of liberty that is part of the fabric of this city and this nation” (Saturday Age Editorial September 29 2012)  Brenna Krenus wrote a few days later that more cameras: “will not engender feelings of safety: they will heighten feelings of fear” (The Age October 2 2012).

Despite their ubiquity surveillance cameras do not unexpectedly present “an intentional intrusion (whether physical or otherwise) upon the situation of another (whether as to the person or his or her personal affairs) where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy; and the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person of ordinary sensibilities” (D Butler '(2005)'A Tort of Invasion of Privacy in Australia?’  Melbourne University Law Review 11)

What does present as intrusive, invasive and unexpected is a new generation of cheap, lightweight airborne cameras mounted on surveillance drones. There is a good example of their capabilities here on youtube

ABC journalist Mark Corcoran told the Sydney Morning Herald "The day is fast approaching where the small personal drone will be an obligatory part of the tool box for journalists, photographers and bloggers"

The Australian Privacy Foundation worried that Kate Middleton “and many other people besides can rest assured that their bare breasts are fair game, anywhere, any time,” after Australian Woman's Day published candid photographs of the pregnant Duchess in a bikini. It is legal to operate a remotely piloted drone in Australia below four hundred feet for non commercial purposes.  In Victoria it is illegal to knowingly use an ‘optical surveillance device’  to record a private activity without consent.

Anxieties about surveillance technologies are often expressed in the same vein as general concerns about photography: a potential loss of anonymity, discomfort about the photographic ‘gaze’, misuse, for example through publication, and the offensiveness of the images themselves. In one notorious case photographs of a dead child were obtained from a helicopter and published without the family’s knowledge.

The grieving parents wrote:

"We are not arguing the fact that the media have an important role to play, what we want is the media acting in a responsible, sensitive and ethical manner for grieving families such as ours and many others...At the time of Molly's loss of life we would have greatly appreciated the opportunity to share with the media in our own time and in our own words the story of her life”

As if to confirm the worst of general anxieties about photography, so-called ‘body scanners’,  cameras that see through clothes to the naked human body, are installed at eight Australian airports.

The Australian Government says The current generation body scanner is equipped with automatic threat recognition technology. This removes the need for screening officers to view detailed or ‘naked’ images and instead highlights areas of concern on a generic ‘stick’ figure. In addition, the body scanner is not able to store personal information about passengers or the screen display generated from individual scans.

The previous post on this topic is here

On Photography - In Trouble?

A woman meets relatives in a busy inner city shopping strip. There is banter, hugs, and before they say their goodbyes, a moment to take a couple of photographs. Later, she relaxes over a coffee in a nearby cafe, peeking at the photos on her camera’s liquid crystal display.

The woman, a friend, a respected artist/photographer, writer and academic, had her camera out again several days later when she was approached by the cafe's owner, who said he'd had complaints from four other patrons that she was 'photographing children'  Being a mother herself and a woman of standing, she was naturally upset and confused by what sounded to her as an accusation and was prompted to write this account:

...I was thoroughly shocked, insulted and offended yesterday when a Manager/Owner of a coffee shop in Camberwell said when he saw me with my camera, that if I brought out my camera again then they would not serve me. Apparently (according to him) he'd had four complaints from people saying that they didn't want their children photographed...

We often speak of transformative technology breathlessly, as if it were a desired, rather than lived, experience. Perversely, the lived experience of transformative technologies is often a negative one.

Anxieties about cameras are as old as the manufacture of film. The tools of photography are notionally extensions of natural, embodied phenomena - the camera a prosthetic eye and the photograph an augmentation of memory - that provided the basis for modern visual communication and began to globalize human experience long before the internet.

The incident itself bears the postmodern imprint of internet-speed culture. Something is remarked upon, there are likes, a critical number is reached, a moderator implements a ban - fixed!  In a spasm of autonomic reflex an artifact with no place in the social body is ejected, and the symbolic order of things restored.

The internet changed photography. Analyses of contemporary photographic practice give next to no account of the wirelessly interconnected lenses embedded in and peeking from everyday artifacts. Everywhere you look, they look back. From doors, walls, cars (both inside and outside), telephones, tablets, television screens and more, existing predominantly not to augment human bodies, but to make and store and categorize recordings of them.

Anxieties about surveillance are as ancient as writing itself. We live in times where old fears are magnified at every turn by experiences of photography as command and control. Those experiences are not novel in Western culture. Whole categories of people, for example those with disabilities, suffer forms of surveillance for the whole of life. The experiences are not novel but have become much more common, and have brought the invisible aspects of photography, the composing eye and controlling hand, to prominence in discussions about photography.

Where the photographer was previously almost invisible, a tabula-rasa upon which events imprinted themselves through an indifferent mechanism, now the question of what is not in a photograph is as salient as the question of what is. The composing eye is inexorably linked in culture on the one hand with expressions of power, and on the other with perversions of it. Chris Munroe writes, in Tracker, of Norman Tinsdale famous 1930s photographs of Aboriginal peoples:

Critics suggest the forlorn expressions staring back at the camera tell a tale of a sorrowful people treated like museum exhibits, firstly measured, weighed then forced to pose awkwardly for photos whilst clutching serial numbers. Many have compared the exploitative look of the images to those of police mug shots. A closer examination of the Tindale genealogical photographic collection reveals almost none of his subjects are smiling at the camera or seemingly engaging at all in the compulsory process either. They look resigned and defeated – an enduring reminder of the dark days of mission life and the Protection Board era.

There is a photograph by Bettina Rheims of style icon Kate Moss, bare-breasted, part of Rheims's Modern  Lovers series. In 1989, when the photograph was taken, Moss was 15. News columnist Andrew Bolt poses a problem with Rheims's photograph better than most:

Hear how Moss herself has described the pain that is the reason for laws to protect children from being forced to expose themselves for the sexual pleasure of others.

and

...This is art, we are told, not pornography. Perfectly fine to stare in a state gallery at a picture not too different from those for which a Melbourne stalker now faces jail. So ogle away, dear art lovers...

 (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Thursday February 14 2013 pp15)

Despite previous controversies over the works of Bill Henson and Ella Dreyfus, the Art Gallery of NSW said it had ''no issue'' displaying Rheims's photograph of Moss. "We exhibit art, not pornography" the gallery told anyone who asked.

Controversies over photography often inhabit a kind of cultural underbelly and are often conducted at megaphone volume between contesting ivory towers. We have all seen politicians, for example, falling over each other on the way to denounce the latest photographic outrage. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, for instance, denouncing a photographic exhibition he hadn’t seen by an artist he’d previously never heard of discussed in a newspaper column he hadn’t read. While many claim outrage, few talk sense, and I think Chris Munroe and Andrew Bolt succinctly express cultural anxieties about who is  watching and why.

Here then are a couple of peaks, or ivory towers, landmarks in the cratered landscape contemporary photography finds itself labouring over. Cultural tensions over history, power, privacy, nudity, art versus porn - a battle some cast as ultimately between good and evil extremes.

Professor of Aesthetics Elaine Scarry provides a substantial contribution to the controversy, from an academic ivory tower, in On Beauty and Being Just

The political critique of beauty is composed of two parts. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements.

and

The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object.

(Elaine Scarry (2006) On Beauty And Being Just, Duckworth, London, pp58)


I'm interested in the first axis of argument because it directly states (but does not solve) a problem often raised. It seems to me that wrong social arrangements are at the heart of Andrew Bolt’s critique of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Beauty has the capacity to wound, not only others but also is itself at risk from the attentions it draws. This line of inquiry goes directly to the heart of anxieties over photographs of children. To paraphrase, innocence is at risk of destruction from the attentions of photography.

Around the same time the Art Gallery of NSW was organising school tours of its new photographic exhibition, Chi Magazine published photographs of a bikini-clad, pregnant, Duchess of Cambridge.

The controversy over those photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge turned upon ideas about public and private moments, privacy versus surveillance. In the photographs themselves the subjects are unaware and unposed, the (anonymous) photographer concealed from their view. The British Royals were reportedly “outraged”, inside their  white-walled palace.

"They are images of such unexceptional normality that there is only limited mention of them on the cover of the magazine," Chi's editor, Alfonso Signorini, told the BBC.

There was, however, many lengthy mentions of the photographs on the covers of other publications. I don't know how many covers above normal circulation a bikini clad aristocrat is good for, but you can bet that every editor who published those photographs worked it out beforehand. Style sells, celebrity sells, and I want to place by example in this geography of mind a market, not in any particular point,  but one which can displace the landscape anywhere, inconveniently, like a blemish upon an already cratered and pockmarked cultural underbelly.

Australian Woman's Day editor Fiona Connolly told News Limited she had no qualms about running the photographs of the Duchess, claiming they were taken by a fellow holiday maker on the Caribbean island of Mustique rather than a paparazzo. "It wasn’t a hard decision to run these photos," she said, and  "we are sensitive to photos that shouldn’t be published, for instance I haven’t laid eyes on the nude photos of Kate."

Nude photographs of the Duchess, also covertly obtained, were published in Grazia Magazine earlier this year. Designer Bella Freud, speaking to Vanity Fair last December about her time as a stylist with a large fashion retailer, describes walls and mood boards pinned with pages torn out of Grazia Magazine of daily sightings of (Kate) Moss. “Whole clothes lines have been made out of one look she put on one morning.” Grazia is typical of many such style, scandal and surveillance pictorial magazines sourcing photographs from long-lensed paparazzi and advertising from the fashion industry. Nudity sells, and what it sells is, paradoxically, apparel.

It seems to me that objections to these photographs are along the lines suggested in Elaine Scarry's second axis of argument, that when we stare at the beautiful Duchess, make her an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the Duchess. The immediately visible destruction is of her privacy, but that is only the beginning. Publication of private moments pose a danger to her moral integrity as well, and none more serious than to the childlike Kate Moss.

Fashion ivory towers Vogue Magazine and Cosmopolitan have traded blows over what Connolly described as sensitivity to photographs of Moss that shouldn't be published.

Corinne Day’s photographs, styled by Cathy Kasterine, of Moss for British Vogue “showing how we all wear our underwear when we’re hanging around the bedroom” as Kasterine put it, were described by competitor Cosmopolitan’s outraged editor as “Hideous and tragic. I believe they can only appeal to the pedophile market. If I had a daughter who looked like that, I would take her to see a doctor”. Moss herself shoots back “Ridiculous. I must have been 19. I’m standing in my underwear. Really controversial.” But Moss has described herself as depressed, and pressured to bear her breasts for the cameras as a sixteen year old in the famous Calvin Klein heroin chic advertisements. New York is a beating heart of uber capitalism, and Moss’s work experience there frames one of the best arguments I know for unionism and the formation of industry associations dedicated to protecting members from moral exploitation.

Photography polarizes opinion at every turn. Worse, dialogue about moral issues are from a distance between the vested interests in ivory towers that sense some worth in their being conducted at megaphone strength. Photography is in trouble. Part of the problem is discourse. At the very moment the camera became ubiquitous, leaders of public opinion, who might be expected to step up and fulfil their self-proclaimed roles as authorities of specification and delineation, are divided and defensive behind the walls of their ivory towers.

Photography is in trouble. At any moment a photographer’s work might be seized, even photographs that previously hung with pride in public spaces, as happened to Bill Henson’s works in recent times. Or a child might be declared a sex offender for life, for posting a naked picture of someone somewhere from their phone, or downloading one to it in an email.

At any moment a woman with a camera in her handbag might become the object of scurrilous whispers and unwelcome attentions. Since one way or another we all carry cameras with us now, the problem can only get worse.

Beginning with this and continuing in the next few few posts on the topic, I'm going to attempt to sketch what I see as marking the boundaries of the problem, and the pathways to them, a geography of mind pursuing the tangled landscape of Civilization itself.  And I'm hoping against hope that it does not follow a trajectory of the photograph from treasured memory to the scene of a crime.

a post industrial post

captain of industry

Nietzsche, the Cardinal, and a leap of faith

It was interesting to read a Thomist argument in a daily paper this week. The Australian published an address to the Global Warming Policy Foundation by leading Australian Catholic, Cardinal George Pell. Cardinal Pell invoked the spirit of Thomas Aquinas in a vigorous prosecution of the case against global warming. I don't care one way or another about the polemic but I'm always intrigued by Thomism. The speech is here (pdf)

Thomas Aquinas was a thirteenth century friar whose life's work was the partial reconciliation of fragments of Platonic and Aristolian thought. In the (somewhat unkind) words of contemporaries, Aquinas and his followers laboured mightily to reconcile in death those who never agreed in life. Drawing from Platonic and Socratic traditions, Thomist philosophy in part underpins modern, secular ideas about universal freedoms and rights. Following Aristotle, Thomist doctrine asserts the necessity for accurate observation that underpins the scientific method.

Thomism teaches that a thing is not necessarily so just because a majority says it is. It is up to individuals to see for themselves, and to work out what is true and what is not. And Thomism teaches that not everything is knowable. Where things are not knowable through observation, Thomism teaches an intellect is sustained by faith, because faith does not end in a true or false proposition, but rather in a reality beyond knowing.

Thomism offers a model of mind as a continuum of knowing and believing, a model rejected by both modern positivism and its postmodern adversary, post structuralism. The modern positivist model of mind is a discontinuum of knowledge and ignorance in which believing depends upon knowing, and ignorance is a kind of poverty of mind, to be pitied and where possible cured. The postmodern, post structuralist position abolishes both objectivity and belief, substituting a continuum of subjective uncertainty, a phenomenological shell game of deceived and deceiving minds. Thomist thought is a handy antidote to both.

I don't care one way or another about the dispute over weather forecasts that preoccupied the Cardinal . The intrigue in the Thomist world view is, for me, the model of the individual human mind as a continuum of knowledge and belief. Classical skepticism, after Pyrrho of Elis (c360-270BCE) tried to develop methods of continually testing knowledge and belief. Old school skeptics were comfortable with what they comprehended as the limits of their knowledge, although those boundaries continuously changed, and promoted methods of suspending, rather than passing, judgement. An age later, Descartes introduced the idea of absolute certainty only after declaring he believed that God would not allow his eyes to be deceived, a leap of faith any Thomist might have taken.

The model of human mind as a continuum of knowing and believing is evident in the self-belief of Nietchze's ubermensch, in Thomist metaphysics, in the origins of the scientific method itself. There is always some tension between knowledge and belief. I believe in freedom. I believe in free speech. I can't objectively prove those exist, somewhere, as universal archetypes. But neither could Plato. Or Descartes, for whom the leap of faith - that God would not give him eyes only to cruelly deceive them - preceded rather than followed any evidential trail.

In Thomism I can see an answer to Nietzsche's call to grow long legs, to see further and to leap from peak to peak. Before I know anything else I need faith in at least myself. Faith I can survive the ordeal, belief I won't fall into the chasm between what is spoken and what is done.

Putting the mob in its place

The brutal suppression of a peaceful protest in Melbourne City Square on October 21 by riot police using attack dogs and chemical weapons signifies a changing relationship between government and governed.

A State government clinging to power by a single vote would not normally set attack dogs upon voters. But these do not seem to be normal times.

This month Australian business heavyweight Don Argus declared war on Australian shareholders unhappy with the average five million dollar paycheck for Australian corporate executives running top 100 companies.

The corporate gravy train is threatened by laws which give Australian shareholders the right to protest against excessive corporate pay packets. Shareholders can move to reject company directors salaries at annual general meetings. But according to Mr. Argus they should not.

Shareholders unhappy with executive remuneration could, he said, sell their shares. And Australians are selling their shares, driving equity markets to historical lows, while executive pay packets soar to new heights.

The town or city square is historically a place for ordinary people to meet and to sometimes protest. Melbourne's city square is an uninviting place surrounded by businesses paying exorbitant rent to trade in a people's place. It is difficult to think of any public space in Melbourne which has not been encroached upon by commercial interests, but our city square represents, after years of mismanagement by Melbourne City Council, the biggest example of an overly commercialized public space in Melbourne.

Don Argus and Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle have turned upon the Australian public who own what they, temporarily and at great expense, control, and there is very little ordinary Australians can do about it. Except vote them out at the next opportunity.

The strange rules of Australian corporate governance guarantee that a single vote against exorbitant executive remuneration is not enough. Shareholders have to vote against corporate remuneration policies at two annual general meetings in a row, to force a change. Company directors only need to vote once to increase their pay. Strange times.

Another strangeness about these times is that freedom has become divisible, with Melbourne's Lord Mayor suddenly acquiring the right to declare a time limit on free speech. This limit exists only in the Lord Mayors mind, and that of the Federal and State political class who endorsed his actions.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says:

All human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to work, social security and education , or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self-determination, are indivisible, interrelated and interdependent. The improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others. Likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others.

The rights of corporations to profit seem to outweigh the rights of citizens to ask questions, to discuss, to assemble, and to protest, at least two to one. It is by any reasonable standard a situation which is probably not fair. It is certainly an indication that individuals have less social gravity in modern affairs than corporations. And that will be welcomed by the political classes, always on the lookout for ways to profit, and cling to power, and to demonize and brutalize what they have called "sheep" and a "mob" opposing them.

First Casualties

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 21: We are the 99 per cent.

indymedia.org.au October 21: There is a big lie being perpetrated on the Australian people.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: We have concerns that state wards are hanging around.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 21:

Traders are suffering and events planned for the square have been disrupted.

Occupy Melbourne spokesperson Nick Carson October 21: People will be arrested.

Police Assistant Commissioner Fontana October 21: They are consuming alcohol and we are concerned that will lead to violence.

Erin Buckley Occupy Melbourne legal support team

October 21: Our observers have witnessed and been told of numerous incidents of excessive force and violence against the peaceful protesters...

Melbourne Age website October 21: Hundreds of people, including school children, are now lining Swanston and Collins streets watching the drama, with some chanting "the whole world is watching".

Unnamed policeman, to Melbourne Herald Sun October 21: Now they know we mean it. No more Christine Nixon stuff.

Melbourne Mayor Robert Doyle October 22: A mindless shriek of protest.

Melbourne Herald Sun October 22: victory for the boys in blue was never in doubt.

The Australian Editorial October 22: There is no meter running on freedom of expression. The internet and social media have their place, but, historically, the town square is in part a space for public expression.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 22: Occupy Melbourne is part of a worldwide movement against the growing disparity between rich and poor, austerity measures and corporate greed. It is a movement for economic and social justice and real democracy. The richest 20% of households in Australia have 60 times the wealth of the poorest 20% of Australians. CEOs are getting huge pay increases and banks are posting record profits. We want a fair share for all Australians. The camp where Occupy Melbourne has been for the past week has been dispersed, but the movement against inequality will continue tomorrow.

Melbourne Age Editorial October 23: Really Lord Mayor?...Peaceful gatherings of this kind shouldn't be broken up in such a heavy handed manner.

Occupy Melbourne protesters October 23: We are the 99 per cent.

#occupy melbourne

99% suppressed, Friday October 21 2011

winter of discontent made glorious spring

I was sorry to read radio MTR is in a bit of trouble, with its audience sinking to around a two percent share. Melbourne Talk Radio is the new kid on the radio block in Melbourne, established less than two years ago.

I don't listen to it regularly, talk radio is a little strident for me in the mornings and MTR's afternoon schedule was Sydney-centric, the last time I did. I hope MTR's format continues under new ownership because it provides an Australian voice that might otherwise go unheard.

Australian media audiences have been fragmenting for at least two decades. New entrants to a broadcast media market find themselves on a playing field that is anything but level. The broadcasters with the most channels will do best because they can deliver a diverse range of programming simultaneously. New Digital television multi-channels are revitalizing a television industry that commentators were writing off a decade ago.

Two percent is about the audience share of so-called for-and-by programming - MTR"s morning schedule is described as in your face conservative by conservative commentators - in all the Australian capital cities. The only way a single channel can make inroads into a new market is by capturing pent up demand for the type of programming it offers at the expense of other more established broadcasters' audiences.

Modern media markets offer more media, more choice, more competition for smaller audiences and more programming tailored for those smaller audiences. Smaller per schedule audiences mean smaller revenues per schedule, and perhaps MTR's failure to capture a larger market share reflects those market realities. Politics is not a favourite of Australian audiences, and media organizations must look to subsidizing news and political comment from revenues derived from other programming with greater audience appeal.

It has been a big couple of weeks for the Australian mass media. The media convergence review is finally underway, with the Australian Press Council kindly stepping up to offer to regulate blogs, and the Australian Communications and Media authority basically recommending it had failed its mission to regulate Australian broadcasters and should therefore be wound up in favour of another body with greater regulatory powers over a larger proportion of Australian media.

A relentless campaign against News Limited and its founder Rupert Murdoch continued with a ferocious attack on the Australian newspaper by Robert Manne In the latest edition of the Quarterly. I would review the essay but it cost ten bucks and an hour and a half of my time to read that I'll never get back, a price I wouldn't wish upon anyone else.

I wrote about broadcaster Alan Jones' attack on working journalists at an anti-government protest rally in Canberra a couple of weeks ago. Following up as best I could I found out that Mr Jones' friends had been delayed at the NSW/ACT border for about three minutes while they sought directions from police. The kindest comment was "Mr Jones appeared at the rally as a private citizen". Everyone else seemed rather exasperated with the eponymous broadcaster. "It was misinformation", one protest organizer offered.

Three journalists were sacked, and one resigned, from the Nine television network's Brisbane newsroom over the so-called choppergate affair. "We rightly demand accountability and high standards of others and we must meet those expectations ourselves", Nine general manager Jeffrey Brown said, adding that the newsroom had failed to meet its own standards.

Spring in Melbourne is as always a wonderful assault upon the senses. Bright sun like honey dripping from pink and white and orange-yellow blossoms, everywhere the scent of Jasmine and budding fig, olive, cherry and pear. Spring brings a promise of renewed hope, and this year's spring seems especially abundant after years of watching gardens parched by unremitting drought struggle to survive. No matter what size a plasma screen is, or how high fidelity, the media's dim glow can't compete at all with the bright promise of abundance and growth finding its way through the heaviest curtains and warming the most shadowed corners.

everywhere in chains

A couple of events this week tested a lifelong commitment to the ideals of free speech. I don't mean the patchwork of principles, common law and case law that privilege some speech as free in Australia. I mean a commitment to a right to freedom of speech without reservation as an overarching principle in Australian life similar to that the United States of America enjoys in its constitution. An ideal that would prevent the Commonwealth, States and their officials acting in ways which impede the free expression of ideas by citizens.

Freedom without responsibility is a hollow affair. If we could only stop debating the extent to which the expression of ideas may be legitimately regulated, and begin instead a dialogue about personal responsibility and the practical limits of freedom of speech, the standard of public debate in Australia might rise like the well baked cake it ought to be. What we have now is a half baked system of privilege, for a privileged few, that seems open to abuse at every turn.

Last weekend an exhibition of photographs by Czech artist Jan Saudek began at the Ballarat Art Gallery without its centrepiece work. A photograph of a semi naked girl and her mother was removed from exhibition after representations by Ballarat Council and Tourism Victoria that the work illustrated or encouraged child prostitution. The Director of the Ballarat International Foto Bienale, Jeff Moorfoot, told The Age newspaper he was warned not to display the photograph because "if this goes to ministerial level chances are we won't fund the next festival" (link contains semi-nudity)

The photograph was published in yesterday's Age newspaper. I have to say I'm repelled by it. It is not the kind of work I would seek out in a gallery. It is a photograph I would avert my eyes from if I stumbled upon it. I feel the strong belief I hold in the ideals of free speech strained like an elastic band wrapped too tightly around a big box and stretched to almost breaking. I felt the same when Andres Cerrano exhibited his Piss Christ in Melbourne.

These are visceral responses to extremely strong images, to a feeling of total wrongness that threatens to, and truthfully sometimes does, overwhelm reason. Over the years I had to occasionally cope with similar feelings about scripts I shot. I have come to understand that a commitment to the ideal of free speech is not without consequences, or any guarantee of freedom from doubt.

The second event which stretched a lifelong commitment to the ideals of free speech to almost breaking was the convoy of no confidence that showed up in Canberra outside Parliament House on Monday to call for a double dissolution election. Inside Parliament the leader of Government business labelled the protest a convoy of no consequence. I would have thought that a single Australian turning up at Parliament House with a beef of some kind is of consequence to the people inside. But that's not what I found disturbing.

Outside Parliament House Broadcaster Alan Jones, who just a few weeks ago I was sticking up for on these pages, alleged his protest was being suppressed. Federal Police, Mr Jones alleged, had been instructed by unnamed others to stop protesters at the NSW/ACT border, and his audience had therefore been significantly diminished by what he described as a conspiracy. Additionally, journalists reporting the event were singled out and some claim bullied, one from Sky News for reporting his observations that the police had not prevented Mr Jones audience attending the protest, and another from the Sydney Morning Herald for asking Mr Jones if he was receiving a fee for his role as master of ceremonies, a question Mr Jones has often asked scientists talking about climate change on his radio program. She was labelled a grub and a disgrace, told she had no right to be there.

I could barely believe my eyes and ears. Mr Jones is a passionate broadcaster, often storied as an honorable man, who sometimes apologizes for the strong rhetoric he customarily uses. His speech is probably protected by the Australian High Court's insistence that utterances about matters connected with free and fair elections must not be interfered with.

Nor should the rights of anyone to ask, report, and be in public places, even to protest in public places, within the law, be interfered with.

The allegations of conspiracy Mr Jones raised must now be carefully investigated to clear the air, in my opinion, because if true our great nation, with its careful separation of executive and operational powers, is seriously broken. A parliamentary inquiry may be in order to restore public confidence in the Federal Police, and I understand the Speaker of the House of Representatives is making some initial inquiries into police operations that day. That is an entirely appropriate response to these extremely serious allegations of official interference in the democratic process. Mr Jones is also entitled to, and absolutely should, allow the allegations of deliberate misreporting be investigated, where appropriate, by the Press Council and the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Australians are entitled to conduct themselves without fear. Australians ought to be able to attend Parliament House without fear. Working Australians, police, journalists, are not above scrutiny, but ought not to be singled out and publicly berated, in the name of freedom of speech, for simply doing their job. “I found the whole experience extremely intimidating - having your name yelled out by Alan Jones in such a hostile way, to such a hostile crowd...was frightening”, one journalist said. We need them all, every one, to do their job for us without fear, to make our democracy strong.

And neither should Directors of Arts Festivals be privately bullied. The rule of law should be paramount in our society. There should be an independent inquiry into the suppression of Jan Saudek's photograph to establish why the rule of law was not applied in this case, the third I know of this year where our new State Government seems to have acted to suppress publications by throwing around their weight rather than through the weight of the law. One Sunday before Easter the Government appeared to threaten a Melbourne pub with closure over an event by Melbourne Goths that appeared blasphemous. A member of State Parliament is under investigation for misleading Parliament over a dispute about the distribution of political material at a city railway station. Now an arts festival Director appears to have been pressured (link contains semi-nudity) into withdrawing a controversial work that might have more properly been referred to the film and literature classification system for fair and independent evaluation on its merits, however dubious they appear to me.

I have been considering quite carefully a response to Julie's post about the riots in England last week. Most if not all commentary on those events point to a breakdown in the rule of law, and a lack of respect for authority, especially police authority. How can we expect young people to have confidence for or respect in either the rule of law, or the police that enforce the law, when one is neglected, and the other stands accused of a grievous conspiracy against the Australian people?

Freedom is a question, not an answer. "People are born free, but live everywhere in chains", wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau also described the social contract: “legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone”, he wrote. Rousseau had some complicated ideas. In modern Australia the people’s house, the Parliament, is one place for sure where questions of all kinds, even unpleasant ones, demand answers rather than scorn. It also demands the people’s unfettered presence, however unpalatable that might be to a government of the day. An art gallery is also a place to ask questions, however unpalatable I personally find them. I would challenge anyone concerned about child abuse, myself included, to walk instead the difficult path of supporting the establishment of a comprehensive, perhaps continuing, Royal Commission on the abuse of children in care, and to support legislation compelling the churches, orphanages and child welfare organizations involved in child protection for the past fifty years to open their books for inspection. Those would provide more constructive routes to learn about and prevent child abuse than suppressing objects that remind us of the great responsibilities society has to its most vulnerable, and how badly we let them down.

Whatever the merits of these two singular but troubling events this week, each illustrate, in their own way, both the limits of freedom as we currently comprehend it and a glimpse of the issues that freedom raises for us but remain, for the present, unresolved. Until we might discover ways to live as free as we are born.

forgetting artistic merit

The Australian Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee has released its review of Australia's censorship, sorry media classification regime, Review of the National Classification Scheme: achieving the right balance.

The Committee reports that Australia's censorship, sorry, media classification, regime, is flawed, does not protect Australians, particularly children, from media they might find offensive; that community concerns regarding sexual violence and the portrayal of persons in a demeaning manner are ignored; the film and literature classification system is flawed; that restricted material is sold alongside children's comics; that the internet is causing confusion for censors (sorry classifiers); and proposes uniform legislation to abolish 'Artistic Merit' as a legal defence to charges of possessing child pornography.

Abolishing the legal defence of 'Artistic Merit' is a perfectly predictable outcome to the failed seizure of photographic works by an internationally renowned Australian artist from a Sydney Gallery by New South Wales Police a couple of years ago. The ones the Prime Minister, one Sunday morning outside a Brisbane church, declared were "disgusting".

According to the law, they weren't disgusting enough to be pornography. So naturally the law has to change.

Abolishing 'Artistic Merit' is possibly the only item on their list of grievances that the politicians can easily achieve. There is a raft of State and Federal legislation dealing with media censorship, sorry, classification, that will need attention before anyone comes close to sorting the rest out.

Across Melbourne Park from me the National Gallery of Victoria is having a blockbuster exhibition of paintings, $24 a ticket, including works by Austrian artist Egon Schiele, who did time in a Vienna jail in 1912 for seducing and abducting a young girl, and possessing more than 100 items of pornography. It is unclear which of his paintings seized then by the Viennese Vice Squad are hanging now on the walls of the NGV.

Also, how old is Chloe? In the famous (in Melbourne anyway) oil painting by Jules Lefebvre hanging in Young and Jackson's she looks like, well, she can't be more than how old? They say 19, but as one Senator remarked, you can't trust artists, can you?

Trawling through the list of witnesses to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee I see that if you take out the Christian groups - who did little to protect children the past fifty years and should be barred from all child protection for the next fifty - the remainder were bureaucrats, both from government and industry peak bodies, and politicians. Not one ordinary, fair minded, Chloe loving Australian in sight. This is the same Australian Senate that promised a wide ranging Royal Commission on the abuse of children in care? Isn't it?

If free speech were guaranteed in Australia we wouldn't have to argue over a mess of confusing rules, regulations and laws about censorship, sorry, media classification. We could instead be having a more fruitful and mature debate about the extent of and limits to individual freedom, even what modes of representation are socially constructive or good, and how artists might best contribute to outstanding social outcomes. Maybe that is a little utopian, a bit too much to expect from twenty first century modernity. Or maybe not. I don't know what the answer is, but creating new bureaucracies, making new laws, criminals from artists, and us all a little less free, doesn't seem helpful at all.

Ears gone temporarily deaf

Sometimes a dissenting voice wavers of its own accord. Sometimes it falls on ears gone temporarily deaf.

There is no guarantee of free speech in Australia, and while not wishing to engage with why that is right now, the way is, I feel, is sometimes unjust.

When I heard that a Sydney radio broadcaster was being investigated by Australian media regulators over its coverage of a political issue I kind of shivered a little as I recall myself telling fifty people or so at a function years ago that (radio personality) John Laws was unfairly accused and unjustly condemned.

Laws, my all time favorite voice, was being investigated by the media regulators over, for want of a better description, commercial product placement on his radio programs. Every producer I knew dreamed of doing product placement deals. It seemed so unfair - I guess it was my very own "Leave Britney Alone" moment.

Nobody is above the law, but I did think that John Laws was on the pointy end of some arbitrary muscle-flexing. I guess you have to take your lumps when you get them, but he always was an entertainer, never claimed to be a journalist.

You could have heard a pin drop in this place.

I had another very different kind of experience of a sudden move in an unexpected direction by the broadcast media regulators which seemed to me equally unjust, in the day. Years before, Melbourne 3MBS-FM, the volunteers broadcasting some wonderful music from the Arts Centre here had to restructure the way the radio station paid for itself. It was an issue to do with the station's playlist, which came with a subscription, which made it somehow less egalitarian than had been intended, the regulator suddenly decided. It caused a great deal of stress, was very technical, it seemed to me, for very little value, to ordinary people just trying to do good.

MBS happily eventually survived, and so did John Laws. And so did I, that awkward moment when I guess I said something nobody wanted to hear.

Today I am looking at a transcript of a radio broadcast that caused all the fuss going on now. I can't get the Sydney broadcaster on my radio, but I sure would like to hear some exchanges on Melbourne radio which are as straightforward as this:

David Karoly: I am receiving a travel allowance to cover the costs of going to meetings of the Science Advisory Panel and I am receiving a small retainer which is substantially less than your daily salary.

Alan Jones: So you're paid by the Government and then you give an opinion on the science of climate change. Have you ever heard about he who pays the piper calls the tune?

It looks like a real lively radio exchange between passionate people to me , and I love the way this Jones guy sucks the reference to his salary right up.

Broadcasters have enforceable agreements with the media regulators that I don't think prohibit asking a straightforward question. Thank goodness somebody still is. I go to sleep listening to Melbourne broadcasters, and while that is sometimes appropriate, at others I would appreciate a wake-up. Please.

Broadcast media regulation in Australia is the way it is. I can't think of a better way myself, except that I admire the United States people greatly for their commitment to the principle of free speech, even if individual cases sometimes fly in the face of common sense. The law may overturn reason, but reason may not overturn the law.

taxing hot air

I would rather sit in a dentist's chair than have lunch on an inner Melbourne footpath. So the tax on local restaurants using outdoor heating introduced in my 'hood to "discourage the use of outdoor gas heaters" won't change my alfresco dining habits one bit.

But I am interested in the reasoning behind the introduction of a tax on hot air. One commentator writes:

Diners who choose to dine outside on very cold days should wear appropriate attire instead of using external gas heaters installed by the business owners. Most of the heat is wasted in warming up the open air, and only small proportion benefits the diners. Such inconsideration reflects on the naivety and hypocrisy of the diners on climate change and global warming argument.

Scrutiny of dress and behaviour, the preoccupation of moralising writers since ancient times, places this tax on outdoor heaters in a moral sphere. Lacking experience, wisdom and judgement, diners are not conforming to moral standards or beliefs to which they profess to aspire. Like wayward children, diners at restaurants that use outdoor heating will be encouraged to act morally by adopting uniform attire, in this case a government issued blanket.

“I would like to start to build a culture in outdoor dining areas of people using a blanket rather than a heater,” one local official told Melbourne media.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labelled what the correspondent I quoted refers to as the global warming argument the greatest moral issue of our time.

Around seventy cafe's in the 'hood use outdoor heaters on footpath dining areas. Those heaters are estimated to produce fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, around three-quarters of a tonne per cafe per year. By contrast, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplies around a quarter of the electricity used in my 'hood, produces sixteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, capped at a net four hundred and fifty million tonnes over time. If global carbon dioxide emissions are changing the weather, as seems likely, common sense suggests that some kind of debate over what to do about that must follow. But I doubt that framing the debate in moral terms will produce any useful outcome.

The platform principles of the deep ecosophy movement (which I have been rather painstakingly working through on this blog for a while now) attempts to frame the debate in rational terms. Those who subscribe to the platform principles "have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes." Taxing fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions smacks of tokenism, and a lack of intellectual rigour, in what ought to be a debate over human interference in nonhuman life. It is simply not good enough to frame this earth-shaking debate as a moral argument, and rail against the hypocrisy of those who are hungry and cold. We need to do better, and I fear we are incapable of rising above the condemnatory rhetoric of everyday moralising, inevitably a domain of the intellectually bankrupt.

end of the world not

May 21 came and went, in the United States, and the rest of the world, without any sign of the apocalypse prophesied by the latest evangelist of doom, American Christian broadcaster Harold Camping.

It will be on May 21st that God will raise up all the dead that have ever died from their graves. Earthquakes will ravage the whole world as the earth will no longer conceal its dead (Isaiah 26:21). People who died as saved individuals will experience the resurrection of their bodies and immediately leave this world to forever be with the Lord. Those who died unsaved will be raised up as well, but only to have their lifeless bodies scattered about the face of all the earth. Death will be everywhere.

Despite warnings contained in the Christian Bible about false prophets, and passages like "But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" (Matthew 24:36) a long line of self-proclaimed prophets have claimed to have found "hidden" parts of the Bible which encode significant dates, such as the creation of the universe, and its end.

Camping told New York Magazine on May 11 that "When we get to May 21 on the calendar in any city or country in the world, and the clock says about – this is based on other verses in the Bible – when the clock says about 6 p.m., there's going to be this tremendous earthquake that's going to make the last earthquake in Japan seem like nothing in comparison. And the whole world will be alerted that Judgment Day has begun."

Camping further assured listeners of his Family Radio Network that the destruction of Earth would be complete by October 21 this year. Camping has previously asserted that the end would come in September 1994.

Some of Camping's disciples reportedly left their jobs and spent all the money they had. One elderly follower spent $US140,000 of savings paying for billboards spreading Camping's message about the end of the world. Hopefully Mr Camping will reimburse him from the millions of dollars donated to his Church each year in the USA.

Camping is reported to be "somewhat bewildered" that his prophecy failed to materialize.

It is perhaps less bewildering to see Government funding for Christian evangelizing to schoolchildren is controversial in Australia.

Wind farms blow an ill wind

A Senate inquiry into wind farms heard evidence last week that the largest wind farm in Australia, at Waubra, near Ballarat, had been causing health problems for people living close by for the past two years. A doctor treating some told ABC-TV the cause was unknown, but its effect was measurable when the wind farms turbines were operating.

Victoria has the most polluting power station in the world, at Hazelwood, and a deadline of generating 25% of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2020 to meet.

Waubra wind farm operator Acciona Energy told the Senate Inquiry they believed their neighbors health issues were real, but doubted the wind farm by itself caused them. Acciona Energy and other wind farm operators receive government grants through the Renewable Energy Target funding scheme. Another operator told the inquiry complaints about wind farms are so few they should be dismissed out of hand. But the new Liberal Victorian government is proposing a two kilometer buffer around wind farms, a suggestion that outraged environmental activists Friends of the Earth. Spokesperson Cam Walker told the ABC thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are on the line if wind farm operators cannot build near people's homes.

Victoria needs to boost energy supplies to cope with growing demand from an expanding population. The operators of the Hazelwood power station expect to be burning 18 million tonnes of coal each year for the next 25 years or more.

Aside from electricity, wind farms bring wealth and economic activity and steady income to country regions dependent upon the vagaries of drought and flooding rains. Some wind farms are community owned and operated, like the The Hepburn Community Wind Park Cooperative at Leonards Hill, south of Daylesford. As more wind farms are built the State will become more economically productive, and can expect a larger share of tax revenue for effort from the Commonwealth treasury as a result. Everyone is happy, and the establishment of large scale wind farms in regional Victoria looks for all the world like a grass-roots effort toward to a better society.

So why would the new Victorian government rock the boat, and slow the gravy train down?

Almost counter-intuitively, wind farms totter if not on the edge of sustainability then close enough to sweat about falling off.

The sun provides all the world's energy, one way or another. Burning coal and other fossil fuels releases energy stored since the sun shone on a very different, carboniferous age. The sun heats the earth and causes weather, waves, and the wind. While a rustic waterwheel or modern windmill takes some energy from those, the climate has some energy spare.

But energy taken from the weather by wind farms cannot be later put back, and in the opinion of geoscientists

"...climatic effects at maximum wind power extraction are similar in magnitude to those associated with a doubling of atmospheric CO2"

and

"Given that only 0.03 TW of wind-derived electricity was produced in 2008, there is still substantial wind power development possible with relatively minor climatic impacts. However, future plans for large-scale wind power development must recognize the finite potential of the Earth system to generate kinetic wind energy." (pdf)

In other words, wind farms are only sustainable in the short term. If we build too many, the weather will change as if we burned twice the coal we do now. I'll say that again another way. There is a price for everything, and energy is no exception. Only a finite number of wind farms can exist before their numbers take too much energy out of the wind for it to keep on blowing the way it does now.

Australia has an abundance of cheap energy from coal, an accident of luck. But I don't know whether it is just to take wind from the sails of other nations on purpose, getting in first to maintain a comparative advantage.

I wonder what Murray Bookchin would have thought of this wind farm affair. "...the natural world itself is not cooptable. The complexity of organic and climatic processes still defies scientific control, just as the marketplace's drive to expand still defies social control" he wrote in 1991. Bookchin argued that the environmental movement was indistinguishable from economics premised upon a supposedly unavoidable conflict between insatiable needs and scarce natural resources, the so called Dismal Science of Thomas Carlyle.

In Enemy of the People, an 1882 play by Henrik Ibsen about a commercial enterprise that makes people ill, one character asserts that in moral matters the individual is superior to the multitude, which is easily led by demagoguery and the promise of easy money. While Ibsen has long since been claimed by the sisterhood as an early proponent of feminism in A Doll's House, Enemy of the People puts the individual at the centre of things, a distinctly humanist view.

And one that might be shared at the top of a new, Liberal, Victorian Government determined to stamp its mark.

Green politics is a posthuman, if not extropian, anti-humanist project that reverberates with themes of humility, introspection, and passivity consistent with the politics of European Feudalism. Green prophet Arne Næss taught that humans only had potential as part of a diverse whole, the ecosphere, where every thing, human, animal, vegetable and so on, has an equal right to be. I don't think there has been such a mystical political movement as the Greens since the Dark Ages. Which weren't really dark at all, just nothing much changed for hundreds of years.

Anathema to the humanist, reformist administration the Victorian Liberals aspire to be.

go to the next post in this thread