Mapping Antipodes

McKenzie Wark


"We are no-one.
Just whites,
marooned in the East
by history."

-- David Ireland

"The only universal history
is the history of contingency."

-- Gilles Deleuze

Maps

There is quite a particular view of things and the world that comes with growing up near the sea. I grew up in Newcastle, in what was then an industrial town, about 100 miles up the coast from Sydney. We lived in a white weatherboard house with a flat roof that perched on the edge of a valley. The Pacific highway ran past the front, and at night the hiss of cars easing around the gentle bend lulled me to sleep.

The house was a sort of antipodean homage to American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whose prairie houses my father, also an architect, admired. Better living through design. He would show me pictures of them, as we lounged in the lounge room, while fresh sunlight cut with gum tree shadows tipped in through the giant plate glass window. Sometimes birds would crash into that glass, and fall to the ground in a stupor. They could see light from the windows opposite and thought they could just fly through. It was a house made of weatherboard and light.

From the big window I could look down into the valley and watch the trains go past the quarry and into the tunnel. Down below, the railway; out the front, Pacific highway, with the house perched in between. And on the pelmet over the big window, on which the curtains seemed permanently open, sat a model of a ship that my brother had glued together. The Cutty Sark, one of the greatest of the clipper ships. Its just a brand of whiskey now.

I went to China once. I went to the Shanghai museum to look at the classical paintings. ThereUs not much to see there. But there is a model of the Cutty Sark. The clipper ships carried coal from Newcastle to Shanghai, and China tea to London. Steam and Suez put an end to that.(1)

I remember looking at a map of China, in that sunlit room, when I was a child. We had been down at the beach, as usual for a bright summer day, and I was furiously digging a hole in the sand with my little plastic spade. "Keep digging like that," my father joked, "and you'll come out on the other side of world, in China." But looking at it on the map at home, China didn't seem to be on the other side of the world. It wasn't very far away at all. And since it was not so far, maybe, one day, I could go there and see for myself.

When I did go to China, in my 20s, I realised that in lots of ways I had learned a conception of the world as the English saw it, building their empire. Its a conception of the world that begins with its oceans. You run your finger across the blue of the map until you find a likely edge. Then you ask what the land beyond that coastal edge is good for: a safe harbour for her majesty's ships, a deep river down which to bring the raw materials, and up which to send the manufactured goods -- and the occasional gunboat. But in China, I met people to whom the world wasn't about edges. It was about what happened in the middle. China is, after all, the middle kingdom. When I tried to explain that I was from the antipodes, from the globe's 'other foot' or other side, the concept didn't make sense. There may only be one world to map, but there is more than one way to map this world.

We had lots of Atlases at home in Newcastle, and I liked to look at them. When Bugs Bunny "took a wrong turn at Alberquerque", I looked it up, so he need never ever get lost again. My home in Newcastle, made of weatherboard and light -- was also made of books and television. I've lost that Atlas, but I still know all the words to the Bugs Bunny Show theme song. My father didn't like me watching American TV shows. That was a blind he would rather have kept closed. I was attracted to the light from the other side of the world.

Sometimes I would take the Atlas down from its special shelf, and trace the outlines of strange countries onto tracing paper. Then I would colour the maps in with coloured pencils. First, I would draw all the contours of nature. In green and blue and brown I projected an image of the ocean, the land and the mountains. This was a jaggy mass of impassable terrains, each line unique and torturous. The geography of place. All craggy and squiggly and never the same twice.

Then, with a fat black marker, I drew big black dots, where the rivers meet the sea. And then, with a ruler, I drew nice straight lines, joining the dots -- cities and highways. The geography of space. The geography of 'second nature'. Everything flattened and straightened and smoothed, like the road and the railway and the flat, plain, pure white walls of our house, in between. The natural barriers and contours of the land overcome, made into the scene and the quarry for a second nature of productive flows.

Next, I took out red marker and fetched some glasses from the kitchen. Placing the glasses over the cities, I traced red circles of varying sizes. I tried to remember how far out of town the radio faded out on those endless car trips, and which cities seemed to have different television when we went there on holidays. The geography of telesthesia, a new map traced on top of nature and second nature. A third nature connecting and coordinating the movements of people, of making of goods, the extractiol of raw material from nature, and transmitting, all the while, images of life, from Bugs Bunny to James Dibble reading the ABC news.(2)

As I said in the last chapter, what was distinctive about the telegraph was that it began a regime of communication where information can travel faster than people or things. The telegraph, telephone, television, telecommunications -- telesthesia. When information can move faster and more freely than people or things, its relation to those other movements and to space itself changes. The coordination of activity can be abstracted from the need to be close together in space.(3)

The development of second nature, of roads and factories and mines and cities -- these are the images that predominate in the culture of the modern. Like in my favourite episode of Bugs Bunny, where Bugs has to fight off developers who want to put a freeway right through the place where he burrowed his burrow. The workmen plant dynamite and blast a huge crater, but Bug's burrow remains, like a long tall funnel, persisting right in the middle of the hole. He is like a little bit of recalcitrant nature, resisting the concreting of the world.

How is it possible, in such a world, that we are still free? When the highwaymen came to pour concrete down Bugs Bunny's burrow -- a macabre scene worthy of Edgar Allen Poe -- Bugs stands at the opening and unfurls an umbrella. He sends great gloops of concrete pouring down the sides of the long funnel that is all that remains of his home. A quick straightening with a trowel, and Bugs has made for himself a concrete highrise home, using the new material to preserve his old habitat. The freeway to Alberquerque will have to detour around him. Bugs is a rabbit of wit and improvisation. How very Australian.

Space of Flows

I still live by the sea, in Ultimo, Sydney. Its a lively place. When I first came here in the mid 80s, it was a mix of low income housing crouching beneath giant warehouses and wool stores. Historian Geoffrey Bolton writes that "wool, more than any other single industry throughout the 1950s and 1960s, was the great mainstay of Australia's export trade."(4) By the 80s, the wool stores were mostly empty. This used to be where raw materials passed in and out of the country. Walking around Ultimo in the 80s was like walking around an empty movie set, after the action has ended. No more ships, no more trade, no more machine shops. George Miller had a lot of pigs here once, while shooting Mad Max III. And the old abandoned powerhouse was also a movie set, before becoming a museum. Buildings lead such contingent lives thesedays. Not the lives for which they were designed at all.

By the mid 90s, the press took to describing Ultimo and adjoining Pyrmont as "Sydney's fastest growing suburb." More than 6,500 apartments went up in the first half of the decade. The Foxtel cable TV headquarters, Channel 10 and the Sydney Casino inked themselves onto the map, joining the Census Bureau and the TAB. Talking heads for the City West Corporation, responsible for the redevelopment of the peninsula, casually talked of private investment in new building of over a billion dollars. Real estate agents talked with considerable enthusiasm about the trend away from the suburbs, where the real estate market is "ratshit", and towards cosmopolitan living. Or they talked with even more enthusiasm about Asian investors, buying Sydney apartments as holiday homes or for their kids to live in while at University. The old Grace Brothers stores on Broadway, very close to Sydney University, converted into 585 units -- sold out in two months before it was even finished. In Ultimo, 62% of the population were born overseas, compared with a Sydney average of 33%.(5) I read all this in the weekend papers, sitting in the French coffee shop. Its cool here, in the shade of a high rise block, if not quiet. But I don't mind the sounds of kids playing basketball and shouting in Cantonese that waft from the roof of the community centre. There was no coffee shop until quite recently. And certainly no community centre.

"The city is increasingly divided between an international core of Australians and foreigners who look across the globe for their cues, and the outlying suburbs, where the people may have more in common with Adelaide residents than the CBD dwellers", writes Deidre Macken. Through the 80s, Sydney increased its share of both the poorest and the richest Australians, compared to other cities. The wealthy cluster in the east and the north, while the poor head west. Draw a line from Castle Hill to the airport, and east of that you have high concentrations of income and education; to the west, high scores for unemployment and obesity. "The great suburban sprawl is now the size of Perth and, for all the attention it receives, might as well be in Western Australia."(6)

Like many people living on the Eastern side of that divide, I've heard rumours about the West, but I've hardly ever been there. I'm more likely to catch a plane to Melbourne or Manila than to visit Parramatta or Penrith. And I'm more likely to be getting phone calls or email from people in New York than from Emu Plains. On top of the differences in income and education and health between Eastern and Western Sydney, there is also a difference in mobility. Some people are getting their information from a widely dispersed range of places, and extracting opportunities from that -- and some people aren't.

A new regime of power has taken hold of the byways of the planet. A regime not of sea-lanes and ship-lore, but of comsats and data flows. We live now, as urban sociologist and planner Manuel Castells says, not in a space of places but a space of flows.(7) Flows of information, flows of money, flows of jobs and livelihoods. Third nature -- new patterns of proximity. New patterns of prosperity -- and poverty. Here I am, here we all are, living on those maps I drew as a kid. Here we are with new problems for the virtual republic, not necessarily anticipated by the designers of third nature, and not necessarily solved just by whacking in a community centre. Cities are now conjunctures where the diasporas of space meet the diasporas of time.

Invasion Day

I didn't much care for the bicentennial celebrations of 1988. Its not just that I sympathise with Aboriginal people who think of Australia Day as Invasion Day, although it is partly that. I grew up reading books on the highland clearances in Scotland, like John Prebble's popular histories. Stories of how southern 'improvers', in league with debt-ridden chiefs, turfed the clansfolk off their hereditary lands, to make way for sheep and the new commercial economy. As Karl Marx wrote, "They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians."(8)

Some fought back against the bailiffs and troopers, but in the end, the land belonged to the sheep. The highlanders found their way into the cities, where they languished in pools of dispossessed labour, until set in motion again by the wheels of factory work. Some emigrated to the colonies, including Australia. Perhaps some made their money running the sheep that finally put the highland wool business -- out of business. Only to see the sheep walks replaced by theme parks of forest and deer, "as fat as London Aldermen."

I always imagined this was my story, but I don't really know. I grew up modern, like my parents, and like their parents, as far as I know. And being modern, one simply doesn't know. "All that is solid melts into air..." Forgetting feels like a 'southerly buster' blowing in off the sea on a hot Sydney day. So I have no stories of the clearances other than from books, just as I have no stories of the invasion of Australia, other than from books. It doesn't pay to forget -- or to invest the past with the burden of too much memory. Its what one makes of the past that frees one from it.

Some of my mother's people were from the highlands. Many of the names speak of such places. My father's family were Glaswegian. Here there are documents, and from documents come facts. John Newlands Wark, born 1817, educated in Glasgow, where he became an engineer. Working for the City and Suburban Gas Co., he acquired a thorough knowledge of the process of gas manufacture, both practical and theoretical. But his wife Margaret suffered from asthma, and was advised by her doctor to move to a suitable climate. And so John and Margaret took a chance, and sailed aboard the City of Manchester, to Auckland, New Zealand, in 1863. Within two years, the first gas flows to the city of Auckland.

The weather in Auckland was not exactly much of an improvement on Glasgow, or on Margaret's health. So John applies for a position in Sydney, as engineer to AGL, the Australian Gas Light Co. Here's another part of the story where chance plays its part. John Wark wasn't offered the job, but the chosen applicant, a Mr T. E. James, dropped dead a few months into his new position. At his second go, John gets the job, ahead of 24 applicants, and becomes the company's engineer in 1868. AGL sacked him five years later. They caught him using AGL tools and workmen to remove pipes from the streets of Sydney, which he had bought from the city council. The pipes were on their way to Bathurst, for what would become the first of an extended family business building and managing gas works for country towns. According to AGL, "Mr Wark was a very good engineer, but a very difficult gentleman."

The AGL is long gone, but not its very fine circular showroom, opposite central railway station. My father took me to see it, to show me our ancestor's name, carved on the foundation stone, as the engineer of the gas storage reservoirs that are still under the building. Its now part of a huge commercial complex. Protected, like Bugs' burrow, by the umbrella of 'heritage', yet incorporated into the new. Both the showroom and the reservoir were empty. The site manager had visions of a restaurant and nightclub.

Invasion Day 1988 just left me cold. On the one hand, I feel like the accidental issue of another dispossessed people, and that I was dispossessed, in turn, of their stories. I grew up modern. So in place of a lost tradition, I found another, in my mother's books, taken down from those functional built-in shelves my father designed for them. Here's John Prebble, from her old orange-jacketed Penguin paperback: "At Culloden, and during the military occupation of the glens, the British government first defeated a tribal uprising and then destroyed the society that had made it possible. The exploitation of the country during the next hundred years was within the same pattern of colonial development -- new economies introduced for the greater wealth of the few, and the unproductive obstacle of a native population removed or reduced."(9) English colonialism did not take place in the antipodes alone. And in the antipodes, many of its foot soldiers were ragged armies of the dispossessed, dispossessing. Ironies of history.

On the other hand, a little part of that greater wealth from the new economies accrued to the Warks. John Newlands Wark, at the time he was sacked by AGL, was on 700 pounds per year. I can't help admiring knowledge applied to organising the production of something useful, be it gas for streetlights or an architect's plan. Even if those productions become, in turn, the raw material for new designs -- the old gas showroom swallowed whole by an office block. The reason why this patrimony might make me look askance at Invasion Day is a little more obscure. If the legacy of those stories about my mother's distant kin instils a certain "postcolonial" resentment of the English and their empire, then maybe the gas works story is about being neither for it nor against it, but making something out of the space it created, to create something else in turn: gas, light, heat, wealth -- and a story.

So while thousands of people crowded into Darling Harbour to look at the tall ships, celebrate the Invasion of the continent and the birth of a free-range prison, I eschewed the short walk down to the shore and watched the whole thing on television. It was a re-enactment of the white invasion of the Australian continent, performed 200 years later for the cameras. As with the first arrival of the first fleet, on this second coming the invaders parked their boats and thanked their sponsors. Where the English came and colonised, corporate captains came and coca-colonised.

I mention all this because while I think by now you can see why I responded to the whole thing with a certain cynical indifference, but I want to explain why it also struck me as quite wonderful. I'm not talking here about the spectacle of English and local panjandrums hopping on and off boats while the band plays and the flags fly and the crowd cheers a bit -- before getting on with the serious business of sunning itself and getting on the piss. Nor am I talking about the Aboriginal protest, which I sympathised: Tiga Bayles told the protest rally that asking Aboriginal people to celebrate Australia day was like asking Jewish people to celebrate the Holocaust. I'm talking about the strange feeling I had all year in 1988, of the extraordinary parallel between the technologies that made the whole thing possible the first time around, and the technologies that made it possible to celebrate it two centuries later.

Antipodes

For a long time Australian culture has manifested a desperate attempt to fix a few things in consciousness between two great abstract terrains of movement. The first is the sea. The sea, as Hegel says, "gives us the idea of the indefinite, the unlimited, and infinite: and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest and to piratical plunder, but also to honest gain and to commerce."(10) Thus, ambivalently, did this first tentative vectors traverse the sea.

This word 'vector' has travelled a bit, from language to language, discourse to discourse, meaning to meaning. I'm very fond of it.(11) Its roots mingle with those of the word 'way'. The way: the road, the course of movement, the path of life. Also tangled up in there is the sense of 'to carry'. The vectors traced by these old English, Dutch and German senses cross with the Latin 'via', and mingle with 'to weigh'. From there its a short path to vectors of velocity, and specialised technical meanings. In geometry a vector is a line of fixed length but no fixed position. In physics, a quantity having direction as well as magnitude. In biology, the means of transmission of an infection. I am unaware of a sense of the term in the engineering of gas works, but no doubt an enterprising engineer could think of one.

The sense I give to the term traces a line through all of those senses. To me, a vector is a technology that moves something from somewhere to somewhere else, at a given speed and cost and under certain specified conditions. They come in two kinds: those that move mostly physical objects about the place, and those that move information. The importance of the distinction lies in the very obvious but sometimes overlooked fact that ever since the telegraph, vectors of information have mostly moved information a lot faster than the prevailing vectors for moving things. Transport and communication were once one and the same thing. Now communication moves at a faster rate, and is able to model and coordinate movements of ever more intricate design over great distances.

One can appreciate the significance of actual roads and communication routes, its less obvious that within the technology of a given vector lurks a virtual dimension. Vectors expand the terrain upon which a great proliferation of contingent and accidental movements might happen to take place: John and Margaret Wark, leaving Glasgow for Auckland on spurious medical advice, and from Auckland to Sydney following a rival's accidental sudden death.

But there is another sense in which vectors expand the reality of the virtual. Besides this road and that underwater cable, there exists all those potential routes, as yet not actualised. Its not just communication vectors that have this virtual property. Its a very real aspect of all kinds of technologies of movement. A vector not only produces certain actual routes of movement, it transforms the whole map into a potential space of such movements. With each new vector, a virtual map comes into being. When I look around my neighbourhood, at all the signs of past roads and routes, from the old wool stores to the new apartment blocks, I think about this virtual geography, which has mapped and remapped the hills of Ultimo even during my life time.

Now that we find ourselves enmeshed in a new net of vectors, those of global communication, all the old anxieties about this vulnerable island continent, with its fragile soils and fragile culture, come back in one form or another, like ancestral ghosts. It is precisely because the 1788 invasion was successful that Australians look at every new vector that opens towards these shores with great unease. Its not guilt that troubles immigrant Australia's relation to the indigenes as much as the fear that we'll suffer the same fate. Perhaps this is the underlying anxiety, that sense that Australians lack something, and for want of it, we may lose what we have. A gambler's anxiety. The fear that we are all, indigenes and immigrants alike, a lost people. We are no one. Everything is lost. First they came and took our land. But we still had our language. Then they came and took our language, but we still had our culture. Then they came and took our culture, and we had nothing -- but we still know how to tell a story.

These are times of both incredulity towards heroic stories about the past, and a growing distaste for stories of victimisation. They are, respectively, what Karl Kraus called "half truths and one-and-a-half truths." Neither suit us very well. There is not enough puff left to puff the nation up with ride, and the alternative leads only to resentment and guilt -- the two singularly most useless emotions for actually changing anything. More than that, there is a lack of faith in the grand process of making second nature, of paving over nature or extracting from it nothing but crushed ore. Romantic yearnings for nature are back: if not Tahiti then at least for an Aboriginal 'spirituality' made palatable for white folks. Something unchanging and unthreatening. Romantic yearnings too for third nature: cyberspace as the promise of a new Tahiti, where virtual Captain Cooks can go cruising without getting themselves killed. But none of this will do.

Power

If the past is a matter of contingency, not destiny, then what can one make of it? The historian of ideas Michel Foucault writes about another kind of relation to the past. A genealogy that records the "singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality."(12) There is no pure moment of beginning, and no destiny, he says. There is no essence of the people, that one might find, magically arising and persisting throughout events. Nothing is, in the end revealed. "Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it has hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history." We are to search through the generations of our descent, not for foundations, but for the accidents that result, in the present, in this body, and the traces left by the past in it, its the practices and postures. History is not about revealing the hidden meaning or order within events, but the grasping of the rules by which bodies are organised.

Foucault's most famous example of the organisation of bodies is contained in his famous reading of Jeremy Bentham's plans for the Panopticon -- the perfect prison, but also the perfect design for a hospital or school. Better living through design. "Disciplinary technologies" for making orderly bodies.(13) From the perspective of the antipodes, or at least from a harbourside flat in Ultimo, one can contrast Foucault's notion of disciplinary technologies with what one might call "vectoral technologies". It is not the Panopticon but the British navy that in this latter view emerges as a key technological regime of power in the early modern period. As Robert Hughes recalls, Bentham's called one of his pamphlets The Panopticon or New South Wales? (14) While Foucault's writings have, I think quite rightly, influenced a lot of Australian writers, his most famous genealogy of the machinery of power is, in this context, a route not taken.

The panoptic and the vectoral have some things in common. They are both techniques for dealing with bodies that don't deal too well with themselves, that get in the way. In both cases, its about making space visible by seeing it with an overlaid grid. A city might set aside certain sites and build enclosed, panoptic spaces on them, within which a grid and a timetable organise the movements and activities of the bodies. Or a city might build ships and pack those bodies off across the sea, making the vectors to and from the antipodes a way of ridding itself of difficult bodies, but maybe also making those bodies productive, setting up flows of useful goods back from the other side. The world becomes the object of the vector, of the potentiality of movement. Bodies, cargoes, weapons, information: this principally naval technology produced, almost as an afterthought, Botany Bay, Sydney, Australia. The antipodean other becomes a project, not a double, for the west.(15) Ideally, everything should flow smoothly. Vectors never quite function as smoothly as panoptic spaces, and those are troublesome enough. Bodies and ships, goods and weapons, orders and reports. There is always someone working on a way to perfect it -- to speed things up, to synchronise it better. But the maps never quite chart every last reef. The weather turns bad, or the food. Or the sailors mutiny, as they did in 1789.(16) The history of the vector is the history of a certain kind of space across which a certain kind of contingency takes place. The kind so central to Australian experience, from the naval vector to the media vector. What matters is understanding where and how that virtual space comes into being, and what kinds of power it makes possible: To know what powers and potentials are there and how to make something of them.

Perception

Maps precede territories. One has to know where a place is before one can find it. When I boarded a plane to China I knew roughly where it was going. I knew from the Atlas I scrutinised as a child. Paul Foss argues that when western explorers went in search of the antipodes, they were not sailing into blind nothingness, but into a space already 'mapped' by the ancient philosophers.(17) On the other side of this world, according to the ancient conjecture, was this world's opposite, its antipode, its other foot. That what was known on the map was less than half, that this lack might be filled by sailing out to find it -- now there is an obscure object of an explorer's passion.

What hampered mapping and moving over the oceans until the 18th century was the lack of an accurate way to fix the position of a ship in longitude. Lattitude is relatively easy. Nature provides ways of perceiving how far north or south on the spinning earth one happens to be. But how far east or west? If one knew the exact time the sun set at one's home port, and could compare it to the time it set where one happened to be, from the difference a sailor could compute a position on the spinning globe.

John Harrison provided the solution, an accurate chronometer that would whirr and tick time in a straight line on ship tossed every which way by the sea.(18) This vector through time would allow navigators like James Cook to know their exact location in space, and map that space, accordingly. Harrison's chronometer, assembled with the other tools of navigation, was a virtual map of the ocean world. Cook made much of it actual, filling in the wavy lines of coast on the grid. Vectors of mapping, or perception, and vectors of movement -- go together.(19)

One of the things that made the English such relentlessly effective imperialists was the ability to assemble the various elements of a vectoral technology. Its not just a matter of good ships and chronometers. These things have to be brought together with the idea of there being something out there in the first place, and the desire to go find it. Power is always about assembling such odd combinations of things. Vectoral power requires something else as well -- a way of linking the passion to discover, the evidence of what is discovered, and the consequent exploitation of that knowledge.

The passion to discover has its roots in classical knowledge, in the notion that there what there is to find in the world are bits of evidence for the pure and eternal forms of which things as we find them are mere copies. The symmetry of the form of the world requires that it has an other side, with attributes that mirror those of the known side of it. More venal desires may naturally follow in the wake of this more abstract idea.

In his remarkable book European Vision and the South Pacific, Bernard Smith shows how the rise of British naval imperialism precipitates the fall of the neoclassical representation that prevailed in the 18th century.(20) The neoclassical style pictured landscapes in terms of the ideal, and this aesthetic was institutionally enshrined in the Royal Academy. What the explorer's pictorial artists were enjoined to perceive were the signs of the pure form underneath the craggy outcrops of rock and imperfect specimens of plants and people. The Royal Society, on the other hand, favoured an aesthetic based on the representation of the typical. Through its connection with scientific naval expeditions to the Pacific, the Royal Society saw to it that the more productively useful representation of the typical became the technique of representing what explorers like Cook and Banks found.

This involves a break with the notion that what one is looking for are the pure forms underneath the rubble. Rather than look for evidence of the forms, the evidence is gathered in and used to create the appropriate categories. This is a species of empiricism, derived from Isaac Newton. The same method developed by David Hume for exploring the archives for evidence about matters past is here applied to exploring the seas for evidence about matters present. These two kinds of knowledge come together in what historian Thomas Richards calls the 'imperial archive'.(21) Orderly series of documents record the typical features and resources of space as it is mapped and explored. The abstract grid of the map fills not only with lines of coast but with lines of annotation, report and pictorial representation.

Passion changes: no longer motivated by the lack of the whole, passion now takes the form of a positive production of something out of the vector, the map, the knowledge of what types of things one may find in various places in the world's antipodes. Or at least, this is one strand of the palpitations of colonial desire, there are no doubt others. Fear of rival colonial vectors, for example. But the particular relationship I want to isolate is the assembling together of the map, the archive, the ship -- and what ships. As Smith says, they "combined the values of a fortress and a travelling laboratory." These combine in turn with the resources at the other end of the world that these things bring within reach.

This process could result in miscalculation, as it did notoriously in the decision to colonise Botany Bay, Australia. The land itself did not live up to its representation.(22) Nevertheless, the pursuit of the vector has also been the endless process of refining and verifying information about the world and hence increasing its openness to development and transformation into second nature. As Smith puts it. "the European control of the world required a landscape practice that could first survey and describe, then evoke in new settlers an emotional engagement with the land that they had alienated from its Aboriginal inhabitants."

By the end of the 18th century, the English imperial archive knew more about the South Pacific than it did about many parts of neighbouring Europe. Some of the most impassable redoubts of the Scottish highlands were still a foreign country. Meanwhile the great south land was drawn into the net of a naval technology able to draw a still wavery black line from one end of the earth's map to the other. Along that line flow the dispossessed, the convicts, back along it, after a while, flows the wool and the wheat and the gold. The virtual space of the map and the archive is made actual according to a very uneven rhythm. The places that a vector draws together aren't necessarily those nearest each other. The craggy resistance of the shape of nature, and the passions and doubts of imperial strategy shape a strange new world of nearness and farness.

Toward the close of the 20th century, what that earlier moment began is drawn, in turn into a new net -- this time of comsats and data flows, along which flow capital transactions and news bulletins. Or in the case of the Australia Live TV show, a televised address by then United States President, Ronald Reagan. I was fascinated by that show, broadcast as a New Year special for the Bicentennial year. It performed Australia live -- the Australia made possible by modern broadcasting technology, which could uplink a signal, live, from anywhere on the continent. But then, irrupting through the pixilated fabric of it, Reagan. A reminder that this technology enables not only a linking of places within the country into a space called Australia, but its seamless linking to an outside. We laughed at Reagan, my New Year's party and me. Like we tried to shield ourselves with an umbrella of wit. How very Australian.

Meaghan Morris says of Australia Live that "it was not a failed portrait of a national identity, nor a poor dramatisation of an Australian social text. It was a 4-hour tourist brochure for international, including Australian, consumption. It celebrated Australia as a vast reservoir of exotic yet familiar (cross culturally accessible) resorts and photographic locations."(23) Again, a question of the passions. The passion that works here is that same productive, relational desire of the vector. Assemble together the TV image, the brochure, your credit card, and off you go. The images offered "produced Australia as a space for visiting, investing, cruising, developing. Its basic theme was (capital) mobility. Comprehensive notes on risks -- drought, grasshopper plagues, restless natives -- were included."

Ethos and Ethics

This combination of the vector with a map and an inventory comes together nicely with certain kinds of passion to make something of what is thus known and connected. None of which are necessarily ethical. What critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer saw as the dark side of enlightenment, are to me the accidents of history that make that diagnosis plausible are right here, in the very fact that I am sitting in Ultimo, Sydney, writing this, right now.(24) Here I am, accidental byproduct of instrumental reason and the vector it drew from England to Australia, and the productive flows it desired, imagined, supervised and recorded, from one side of the world to the other. There is quite a particular view of things and the world that comes with growing up by the sea.

But from where can one acquire an ethical view of this? 'Ethic' is a word that goes back to the ancient Greek 'ethos', meaning character or disposition. Thesedays, 'ethos' refers to the character of the times, the milieu. Its what I've been describing in drawing a parallel between the ethos of the 18th century and its naval vectors and the ethos of the 20th century and its media vectors, both of which overcome barriers, obstacles and partitions, threading space together in ways make people and things into resources, but which also encourages new passions and new ways of making a way of life.

On the other hand 'ethics' refers to the practice of judging how to act in a given ethos. Its not the same thing as morality, which I think of as a more or less fixed set of rules, administered by some authority, that people either obey or transgress. Ethics is more like a style of judging and acting, taking each situation as it comes, drawing on one's memory of simliar situations, and on the stories one knows that record other people's encounters with difficult situations. I will develop this idea of an ethics more later. For the time being, all that needs adding is that an ethics by which people act is clearly necessary for the idea of self making. An ethic a bundle of tools that form a technique of the self.

A first ethical point of view for judging events in the ethos of the vector os from the point of view of the other. 'Captain Cook' cuts quite a different figure in Aboriginal stories, as agent and harbinger of dispossession.(25) But it may not be possible to reconcile a story told from the point of view of what was produced and by who, and a story told from the point of view of those dispossessed in the process. Even if conciliation is in theory possible, there is not yet a space of indifference where such a thing might be produced.(26) In the case of the continent of Australia, Aboriginal people were not exactly part of the inventory of things to be productively assembled -- and still aren't. Here's the irony: It is slowly dawning on immigrant Australia that just as indigenous populations did not figure as part of the productive desire for the resources of the continent in the 18th century, immigrant Australian populations don't necessarily figure as part of the contemporary desires of the international mining, banking, trading and tourism industries. In the reckoning of a virtual geography, everything is just a potential resource for the conjunction of forces. So some immigrant Australians start to dimly perceive what indigenous Australians already know: that this is not yet a virtual republic in which the extension of all the people's desires into a common world of conversation might have something to say about the ordering of things for people, rather than of people as things.

Another ethical point of view -- that of the earth itself. Martin Heidegger worried about the way in which what I would call vectoral technologies of perception produced the world as if it were a series of pictures, framed as if they were meant for us, brought into proximity as if they were meant to be -- just for us. It makes it look as if nature intended us to make it over into second nature. The combination of vectors of mapping and movement produce the earth itself as if it were the most natural thing in the world that it respond to our passions.(27) Of this conceit, the world complains.

Autonomy versus antipodality

A third ethical point of view: not the other subject, not the objectified earth, but the vector itself. Antipodality: the feeling of being neither here nor there. It is an experience of identity in relation to the other in which the relation always appears more strongly to consciousness than either the identity it founds or the other it projects.

Experiencing antipodality is always very unsettling, sometimes a little schizophrenic. There is nothing uniquely Australian about it, although it is a very common anxiety in Australian culture.(28) This is a place which is always in a relation to an elsewhere, which is always defined by its relation to a powerful other. Sometimes its our powerful friends: the British or the Americans. Sometimes its powerful threats: Asian hordes, communist dominoes, and, more than once, the Russians.

I think that thesedays the anxiety of antipodality is growing ever more common. The globalisation of trade flows and cultural flows made possible by information technology re-opens the old wounds of identity, breaking the skin at unexpected places. The volume and velocity of cultural product in circulation keeps rising.(29) Popular music, cinema and television, the raw materials of popular culture, are increasingly sold into global markets in accordance with transnational financing and marketing plans. Suddenly cultural identity looks like it is in flux. The relations and the flows are more clearly in view than the sources or destinations. Cultural differences are no longer so tied to the experience of the particularities of place. These TverticalU differences, of locality, ethnicity, nation are doubled by ThorizontalU differences, determined not by being rooted in a particular place but by being plugged into a particular circuit. We vainly try to preserve forms of difference that are rapidly reorganising themselves along another axis.(30)

This new experience of difference is an experience of an active trajectory between places, identities, formations, rather than a drawing of borders, be they of the self or place. This is antipodality. Antipodality is the cultural difference created by the vector. The acceleration of the vectors of transnational communication will make the antipodean experience more common. With CNN beaming into every part of the globe that can afford it, many people are experiencing 'antipodality', the feeling of being caught in a network of cultural trajectories beyond their control.(31) In the overdeveloped world, both the culture of everyday life and the culture of scholarly thinking about the present seem to me to betray traces of unease if not downright paranoia about antipodality. Yet it is the emergent axis of technocultural struggle.

As the tyranny of distance gives way to the vector, new defensive mechanisms have been required at the level of the nation. On the terrain of cultural flows, a twofold process has occurred. The integration of the space of the continent into one media market has only taken place quite recently, via satellite technology. At one and the same time broadcasters have integrated the national broadcasting space and hooked it up to the global satellite feeds.(32) Until recently, this tendency towards antipodality was countered by local content rules in television broadcasting. As with local content rules in radio, these were successful in promoting the production of high quality, popular media products, which in turn were successfully marketed overseas. Australian TV programming now has a global audience, and Australia is a successful supplier of recorded music to the world market. In all, these policies balanced some degree of autonomy with a cosmopolitan media flow. The combined effect of lunatic 'free market' policies and pressure from American program producers to have services, including cultural ones, included under GATT agreements are steadily leading to an erosion of autonomous Australian cultural intervention into the global flow.(33)

What would things be like if the vector was perfected? Deleuze and Guattari ask provocatively and more than once: "Perhaps we have not become abstract enough?"(34) What would it mean to become more abstract, ever more abstracted from the boundedness of territory and subjectivity? One can imagine a delirious future, beyond cyberspace. Not the future of MarxU communism: from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs. Rather the future of the abstract, virtual space of the vector made actual: where every trajectory is potentially connected to every other trajectory, and there all trajectories are equal and equally rootless. A world of mobile phones, all ceaselessly mobile. Better living by design. The question to ask is why this is not coming to pass, as advertised.

I feel the need to go looking for roots. A strange thing for me to be saying. I said: "we no longer have roots, we have aerials." And I still say it. This essay rephrases one of its meanings. When one is implicated in a network of vectors, chance cuts across the past, but leaves its traces on the bodies of all those it cuts. There's no past to search for that will reveal a true identity or destiny. But there is a past that might say something about the wit of knowing when to hold up the umbrella and when to sing in the rain.

Notes

  1. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1981, p215
  2. See McKenzie Wark, 'Third Nature', Cultural Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 1994, pp115-132
  3. James Carey, 'Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph', Communication as Culture, Unwin Hyman, Boston, 1989
  4. Geoffrey Bolton, The Oxford History of Australia Volume 5: The Middle Way 1942-1995, Oxford Unviersity Press, Melbourne, 1996, p91
  5. Deidre Macken, 'Asia's Southern Suburb', Sydney Morning Herald, 6th September, 1996; Leonie Lamont, 'Life in a Fish Bowl Can Sure Beat Suburbia', Sydney Mroning Herald, 13th July, 1996; Peter Lalor, 'There Goes the Neighbourhood', Daily Telegraph, 21st September, 1996.
  6. Deidre Macken, 'A City Divided', Sydney Morning Herald, 5th October, 1996
  7. Manuel Castells, The Informational City, Basil Blackwell, Cambridge, 1989
  8. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, p895
  9. John Prebble, The Highland Clearances, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1969, p304
  10. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York, 1991, p90
  11. See McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, Indiana University Press, 1994,pp11-14
  12. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Geneaology, History', in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1977, p139, p144 for the following quote; see also Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, London, 1977
  13. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1977,
  14. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, p123
  15. Paul Foss, 'Theatrum Nondum Cogitorum' in The Foreign Bodies Papers, Local Consumption Series 1, Sydney, 1981
  16. G. E. Manwaring and Bonamy Dobre, Mutiny: The Floating Republic, Cresset Library, London, 1987
  17. Paul Foss, 'Theatrum Cogitorum', in Art & Text
  18. The most readable account of Harrison's work is Dava Sobel's delightful little book Longitude, Fourth estate, London, 1996
  19. McKenzie Wark, 'The Logistics of Perception', Meanjin, Vol. 49, No. 1, Autumn 1990,
  20. Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, Oxford University Press, 1989
  21. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, Verso, London, 1993
  22. See Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay, Knopf, New York, 1988
  23. Meaghan Morris, 'Panorama: The Live, The Dead and The Living', in Paul Foss (ed) Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, Pluto Press, Sydney 1988
  24. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Englightenment, Verso, London, 1979
  25. See the work of Deborah Bird Rose
  26. See John Hartley and Alan McKee (eds) Telling Both Stories: Indigenous Australia and the Media, Arts Enterprise, Perth, 1996
  27. Martin Heidegger, 'The Age of the World Picture', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper, New York, 1977. For a good introduction to this difficult thinker, see George Steiner, Martin Heidegger, University of Chicago Press, 1989
  28. See Ross Gibson's essays, especially his reading of Mad Max in South of the West, Indiana University Press, Bloomigton, 1992
  29. See also McKenzie Wark, Virtual Geography, Indiana University Press, 1994
  30. Roland Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture, Sage Books, London, 1992
  31. McKenzie Wark, 'News Bites: WAR TV in the Gulf', Meanjin, Vol. 50, No. 1, 1991
  32. Tom O'Regan, 'Towards a High Communications Policy', Continuum, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1988
  33. Stuart Cunningham, Framing Culture: Criticism and Policy in Australia, Allen & Uniwn, Sydney, 1992
  34. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Athlone Press, London, 1984, p321

(c) McKenzie Wark, 1997. May not be reproduced without permission. From the forthcoming book The Virtual Republic, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997 McKenzie Wark lectures in media studies at Macquarie University, Sydney

mail to: mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au
http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark








last update: 2.3.1997

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