Tony Hannibal Blair

[imomus]

These, it seems, are the last days of Tony Blair. It's looking increasingly likely that he'll be deposed in a bloodless coup this weekend while he's away on holiday in the Caribbean, or toppled at the Labour Party conference next month. Perhaps he'll crusade on for another year and fulfill his ambition to outlast Margaret Thatcher. At any rate, we should be preparing our valedictions now.

I was planning to write a scathing piece about Blair's career today. But, really, what's the point? There's nothing I could say that isn't already being said all over newspapers like The Guardian in op eds, blogs and commentary pieces. So I've decided to stay one step ahead, to do something a bit more original. I'll take the water of Tony Blair's deeds and pour it into an ice tray moulded, not in the shape of his own head, but someone else's; the concrete poet, artist and architect Vito Hannibal Acconci. I call this method Parallel Profiling. (Private property fans, please note: this technique is copyleft. Anyone can use Parallel Profiling without paying for it, as long as they don't charge for it either.)

So, here goes.

Tony Blair: Neither an installation artist nor an architect -- let alone a poet -- Tony Blair did not shoot to fame with an action called "Seedbed" which involved him lying under a raised platform masturbating while broadcasting his sexual fantasies to all comers. Although he erected millions of security cameras around the UK, he never got interested enough in what people do to follow someone around until they passed from public to private space, then type up the results and send them to a friend, or hang around piers, telling a selected stranger "something that I’m ashamed of and that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t tell a soul, something that – if it were made public – could be used against me." On the contrary, Blair always insisted on his own complete rectitude.

Although others filled up hours and hours of video tape with his "conviction" speeches, Tony Blair has signally failed to investigate the medium of video himself, let alone push it into new areas. He hasn't made a single piece in which he, for instance, explores his own naked body or lies back smoking, playing music and addressing viewers as if we're lovers being ardently pursued.

Despite sitting weekly around a big conference table bullying and pontificating, Tony Blair never considered actually designing a table, a radical conference table, for instance, which juts through a window and then eight feet over the street below. He also never made a building which, remarkably, with the swing of a few hatches, can be opened entirely to the sidewalk, becoming a metaphor of transparency (like the Storefront for Art and Architecture on New York's Kenmare Street, currently showing the exhibition Portable).



Vito Acconci: I'll be brief. Vito Acconci hasn't been responsible for the biggest erosion of democratic power -- the power of the judiciary, parliament and the cabinet -- that Britain has ever seen. He hasn't taken a nation to war under completely false pretences. He hasn't declared that he's shifted from being a utilitarian to more of a belief that there's such a thing as "natural law". He isn't Britain's most religious prime minister since Gladstone, "seeking authorisation for war, as well as personal spiritual solace, in the Gospels."

Never having purged a socialist party of all its socialists, Acconci doesn't now insist on seeing every single conflict in the world as a battle between extremists and moderates. He's never compared himself smugly to Jesus by declaring that "Jesus was a modernizer", and he doesn't insist on calling any piece of capital-friendly, clock-turning-back legislation "reform". Acconci hasn't offered "cash for peerages" or become a sort of Hollywood butler to the most right-wing president in American history. Acconci doesn't believe that democracy can be rained down on other countries in the form of heavy munitions, or that the state of Israel is right whatever it does.

Whereas it's possible to see Acconci believing that history can be written in human seed, nobody could accuse him of trying to write it in blood -- and creating, in the process, precisely the sort of "failed states" and hardline Islamist terrorism he claims to deplore. Acconci doesn't then define the resulting anger as an "arc of extremism which must be confronted", hinting that he will attack yet more sovereign states, in defiance of all international law.

Vito Acconci leaves the world better for his actions, Tony Blair leaves it worse. But at least -- any day now -- he leaves.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We could have a "Little Englander" foreign policy, of regarding Bosnia, Serbia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Afghanistan, Sudan and Lebanon ALL as "far away places of which we know nothing". That's what the Swiss do, and it has the benefit of consistency. But we mostly have people criticizing Blair for some interventions while simultaneously insisting on others. People who enthusiastically supported the NATO bombing of Serbia and are now demanding we intervene to stop Israel behaving like... NATO in Serbia. People who were glad to see Milosevic in a courtroom but not Saddam. At the last UK General Election a survey of British Muslims found the most important issue for them was not Education or the Health Service, but Kashmir. They want Britain to play a more interventionist role in the Indian subcontinent (again!) - while getting our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, of course.

I share your concern about Blair because he's religiously motivated. But let's also apply that standard to Nasrallah (and his "God Party"), Ahmadnijad and others. I have noticed that many people sneered at Blair's religiosity while "understanding" Muslim death threats over the MoToons. Again, make your mind up which way you want it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What you're talking about here is what Eric Kaufmann calls "asymmetrical multiculturalism": the idea that minority groups should express their ethnicity while dominant ones should transcend theirs.

While it may seem fair to call for a level playing field, to call for "consistency" in deciding who should and shouldn't transcend their ethnicity, I don't think it is. As I said in my Secret Life of Eurabia (http://imomus.livejournal.com/2006/01/09/) essay:

"This "Boo hoo, it's not fair!" attitude ("why are they allowed to cover their faces on ID cards, and we aren't?") leads to accusations of "asymmetrical multiculturalism", identified by right wingers as a weakness of the liberal position. Why do we encourage minorities to celebrate their ethnic specificity while making it taboo for the indigenous majority to do the same? Why are we tolerant even of the intolerance of others? The answer is that power changes everything. It is because we're the majority that we must indulge minorities but not indulge ourselves. Deconstruction theory tells us that every binary has a dominant and a repressed element. There can be no "fairness" in treating those elements as if they were equal, and even less in proposing, through sci-fi scenarios like "Eurabia" and "dhimmitude", that the repressed element is somehow about to become the dominant one. Multiculturalism needs to be asymmetrical because power imbalances make asymmetry the reality."

[(Anonymous)]

Two points. First, what would you do about, say, the recent Birmingham riots, in which different minorities (Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani) attacked each other? The recent report on the riots suggested that multiculturalist funding policies had created a series of parallel solitudes, and had intensified "us and them" divisions. It also fostered a "take me to your leader" attitude, with unelected old men with beards transformed into community spokespeople, when they really just spoke for themselves.

Second, it's often people within these minorities who are most at risk from multiculturalism. The UK government recently dropped a proposed law against forced marriages for fear of upsetting Muslim elders. This means abandoning teenage Muslim girls to potential abuse. It's interesting that Sarfraz Manzoor has now emerged as the most vocal opponent of religious schools in the UK. He recently did a radio report contrasting the attitude to sectarian religious schooling in Northern Ireland - where everyone says it's bad - with England, where multiculturalists think it's good.

[(Anonymous)]

I think there's a real conflict between multiculturalism and Gini-ism. Good Gini societies with relatively low social inequality, like Japan, tend to be pretty mono-cultural. The wealthier earners are prepared to pay high taxes for the poor because they view the poor not as exotic others, but as people essentially like themselves who've fallen on hard times. I don't know for sure, but I expect that the more multicultural (=less socially cohesive) a society is, the more income inequality it will have.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think there's a real conflict between multiculturalism and Gini-ism. Good Gini societies with relatively low social inequality, like Japan, tend to be pretty mono-cultural.

I agree with your second sentence, but not your first. A multiculturalism which only subsidised people who were racially the same would not be multiculturalism at all. This is "unfinished sympathy".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

what would you do about, say, the recent Birmingham riots, in which different minorities (Afro-Caribbean and Pakistani) attacked each other? The recent report on the riots suggested that multiculturalist funding policies had created a series of parallel solitudes

We're pretty arrogant if we think that what Freud described as the murderousness of "the narcissism of small differences" can be solved by something so boring and bureaucratic as samll readjustments in funding policies, subsidy or legislation. My understanding of the Birmingham riots is that they were sparked by sexual issues; unfounded rumours of molestation of one community's women by the other. Also, having married the daughter of the then-President of the Bangladeshi Welfare Association in London's Brick Lane, I can tell you that those community elders speak for more than just themselves, even if they don't speak for the whole Bengali community. I respect my ex father-in-law's attempts to preserve Bengali traditions, even if in the end I married his daughter against his wishes. Immigrant communities must be allowed to keep their own traditions. It's completely irrelevant that they're "unelected"; they get where they are by legitimation processes which are meaningful to their community (for instance, by being a hafiz, someone who's memorized the whole Koran).

Enforced marriage should be struggled against by the people involved (as Shazna and I struggled against it, successfully) rather than by blanket legislation forcing people to assimilate rather than merely integrate. (The difference: you integrate by being accepted as you are, you assimilate by trying to become like someone else.)