Links in the right coloumn should be fixed now.

Managing Director Sotsim, CEO of the TRU Corporation, wrung his hands in glee. His band of lawyers had finally succeeded in placing Cardinal Mistos, deposed leader of the now-defunct EyeRak Inc, behind bars. The courts, generously sponsored by TRU's Eternal Democracy Fund, had admitted a motion that charged Mistos with Crimes Agaist Humanity, and specifically the Democratic Parts Of It. He would also be charged with Evil Terrorism and Bad Acts In General, along with a long list of Also Awful Crimes and Misdemeanors, such as drunk driving, adultery, procrastination and trafficking in Minor Pornography.

With Cardinal Mistos stored away in a prison cell in some Carribean Island, or, even better, spectacularly Hung On The Town Square, Sotsim's Enemy Numero Uno with be history. The last pockets of resistance from within the Newly Acquired Companies would wither away, and Managing Director Sotsim could introduce his final solution to the EyeRak Problem.

The Human Resources Division of TRU had estimated that it would be necessary to develop a policy on Lower-Level Employee Disposal, if TRU were to avoid future social disruptions in productivity. The Very Poorly Incomed to Extremely Poorly and Non Incomed ratio was diminishing, and, Human Resources estimated, would be in a 1:1 relation within a short time, unless the Corporation made an effort to take charge of the Problem.

Most of the suggestions offered by Human Resources entailed a significant expense on TRU's part, and Sotsim had spent many a sleepless night pondering how to design a plan that would make the Lower-Level Employees put up the cost of Solving the Problem. But this very morning he had woken up with a clear idea crystallized before his eyes. All he needed was Cardinal Mistos out of the way, and no resistance would be non-defeasible.

Managing Director Stimos called for an urgent meeting with the Members of the Marketing Division.

"The arrest of Cardinal Mistos removes the shadow hanging over our plans for the final solution the our Problem. Now we must make it clear to those people that the cause of their Low Level of Life lies with those who are Even Lower. If it hadn't been so many Really Poor People poaching on their resources, it would be more to share between fewer. Isn't that obvious to everyone?" Stimos asked rethorically.

The Members of the Marketing Division nodded their heads.

"So, to make a long story short, the problem is that there's too many Really Poor People. And the solution is To Make Less. Here's what I want you to do: Make a campaign that emphasises the problem of Reproduction among the Really Poor. Some disease or something. Get some of the Low Levels to support the campaign, and we have a winner!"

The Members of the Marketing Division nodded their heads.

Read Untitled off-line.

*

Re-flecting on Bourdieu's notion of the failed gift-exchange in Outline of a Theory of Practice. I'm not sure, but would it be off the mark to read Bourdieu's intervention there as an attempt to understand mis-interpellation as a matter of academese?

To try to be specific, observe page 5. Contra the notion that an objective truth of gifts is to be found in the model (and not the observer) of gift exchange, Bourdieu rites:

Any really [the trick word] objective [oops, another one] analysis [dang, a third one] of the exchange of gifts, words, challenges, or even women must allow for the fact that each of these inaugural acts may misfire, and that it receives its meaning, in any case, from the response it triggers off, even if the response is a failure to reply that retrospectively removes its intended meaning.

What must be introduced to the problematic, if I read B correctly, is a sense of time, the meaning of temporal displacements of gift and counter-gift.

Ahem... Probably not very helpful, but it made itself written.

In coherence,

Inta entered the yellow-green taxi at the Uqbar International Airport. She had just arrived, as one of the first travellers to this remote area of the TRU Corporation's newly acquired territories. On her way to Hotel Rio Grande do Sul, she reflected on the way the corporation had already made its marks on the Uqbar landscape. During the Take-Over, it had been speculated that Mickey's, a fast food chain controlled by TRU, would establish outlets across the new territories and gradually wrestle control of food provision from local vendors. As she glanced out the window of the taxi, Inta observed half a dosen Mickey's signs, the characteristic black oval ears, hovering above an emerging outlet.

The lobby of Hotel Rio Grande do Sul was as she expected, its old-world charm intact. Inta was chaperoned to her room on the second floor, with a view to the pool, by a hotel clerk who had the name "Felix" inscribed between the hotel's logo and the slogan "These are the MOST significant of all times" on his badge. As he put her suitcase down, she turned from the window, where she had contemplated the view.

"Felix," Inta said.

"Yes, Madam?"

"Could you do me a favor and bring me a cup of the local brew."

"Local brew?"

"Tea, I mean. The local tea."

"Certainly, Madam. Right away, Madam," Felix said and slunk out the door.

Inta had come to attend the Intra-Paracelcist biannual convention at the hotel. This year the proceeding would be devoted to the premise of "Deference, or a time not marked by prefiguration and fulfillment." She sat down by the small desk vis-a-vis the window, and leafed through the papers that had been left for idle guests. Between TRU Times, a short guide to local sites published by the Transverse Society, and the leaflet Night life in Uqbar, she found a sheet of paper, with the imprint "hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö." Underneath someone had written "Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned. XS."

Felix arrived with the tea, and she paid him handsomely, watching his small buttocks are they wrestled beneath his white pants and made their way for the door. She turned to face the window, surprised that the moon was already up, shining almost as brightly as the sun had done a few minutes ago. Inta hadn't noticed the change, but now she realized that the moon gave a dark yellow gloss to the things it illuminated: the terrace and the swimming pool, the window frame and the curtains, the bed and her dress.

In the elevator, Inta was tapping her right index finger lightly on her purse, only to recognize the background music as one of the odes of "Crane Jackson's Fountain Street Theater," a copy of which she had acquired at a street sale in Toronto a few years previously. She decided not to allow it to collect dust. And, refreshed by the ambiguous muzak, she dived into the party of Paracelcists at Hotel Rio Grande do Sul in Uqbar.

***

The night was about to surrender to the inevitable day, and most of the conventioners had left the hotel bar for their respective lodgings, when Inta discovered a book that someone had left on a table in the far end of the room. Or, rather, a fragment of a book. Its cover lost, the pagination indicated that she had stumbled upon some ten pages of a larger volume. The first page of the fragment bore the title "Gift, time" and at the bottom of the page it was indicated that it was removed from a Volume X of A First Encyclopædia. It's author had subtitled the entry "Time of the Gift in Tlön," and was arguing against the notion of gift exchange propounded by the followers of one Diodorus, who had claimed that if it is true to say of a thing that it will be, then it must one day be true to say that it is, or, "Today is tomorrow, because yesterday tomorrow was today."

The author of the fragment claimed that the followers of Diodorus must be mistaken, since cycles of reciprocity are "not the irresistible gearing of obligatory practices." Gifts may suffer multiple faiths, and, because of it, can have no objective prediction. Rather, gifts receive their meanings from the responses they trigger. These responses may be deferred or instantaneous, legato or staccato, marked by delay or rush, but in either case, those who participate in the cycle must pretend that they do not possess full knowledge of the meanings of their exchange.

The first rule about counter-gifts, the author claimed, was that they should be deferred and different, or they could be taken as an insult. It mustn't be a return of the same kind of gift, that would be a refusal, or return, of the gift, and it must be preceded by an interval. The author quotes La Rochefoucauld in this regard: "Overmuch eagerness to discharge one's obligation is a form of ingratitude." It is a question of style, but in each case, and particularly with regard to their use of time, the participants must try to hide the truth of what they are doing from themselves and the others.

Inta shook her head with an astonished sense of dizziness. She took the pages from the table, and decided to bring them up to her room to study them further. She could tell the receptionist in the morning that she'd brought some papers to her room inadvertently, and that she'd like them to trace their owner. In the lobby she filled a glass with water from a bronze jar. It tasted peculiarly sweet.

1. Setting the Stage: 1948-1976
After the victory of the Purified Nationalist Party in the 1948 elections, the South African state embarked on a program of hardened social boundaries along "racial" or "ethnic" lines.*1 Passport laws were hardened, control of influx to the cities were strengthened, the Immorality Act banned interracial marriages etc. In the 1950s Sophiatown was dismantled. Afrikaans gained recognition as an official language on par with English. On short, the attempt to suture the social by erecting non-permeable boundaries between whites and non-whites was pursued to the full extent of its logic. Cities were to be white, while non-whites were moved into townships and homelands.

This policy wasn't implemented without protest. The demonstration that in some ways inaugurated the modern resistance to apartheid was a peaceful protest by women burning their passports with the slogans "with passports we are slaves" and "women don't want passports." The period also saw the establishment of the PAC, the ANC Youth League, and the Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, led by Nelson Mandela, who was later convicted for treason in the Rivonia trials. By 1976 the protests were widespread and organized, to some extent, around popular imagery, such as the widely circulated picture of Nelson Mandela behind pridon bars. When the state, then, introduced Afrikaans as a compulsory language in schools, riots broke out in the South-Western Townships of Johannesburg (Soweto) and other areas. Schoolchildren refused instruction in what was perceived as the oppressor's language, and took to the streets, marching and singing songs of protest. The state responded with bullets. (See, e.g., Sarafina (starring Whoopi Goldberg) for a Brechtian rendition.) The international community responded with sanctions against the apartheid state.

2. The Total Strategy
By the time PW Botha took power, then, it was beyond doubt that the regime was in a serious crisis. It was threatened both from within and without, and the state articulated the juncture as a conspiracy of communists set to wreck havoc.*2 Botha's remedy, termed the total strategy, was two-pronged. Domestically, the state would attempt to manufacture and coopt a "black middle class" (this concept is still prominent in contemporary discourses on South African society), while, as a matter of promotion, it would reformulate a number of oppressive mechanisms to make them appear as more contemporary.

Hence, the homelands were now increasingly referred to as nations, with a degree of political autonomy. Passports controls were eased, while other forms of influx control was intensified. The powers and resources of the secred police grew immensely. Various programs of more "scientific" population control was investigated, such as the infamous project by Dr "Death" Besson to devise a chemical agent that would only kill people with a dark complexion. Foreign operations were intensified. (There is still suspicion that the South African Secret Service may have been behind the murder of Socialist prime minister Olof Palme, perhaps because of his vehement, principled and articulate opposition to the South African regime.)

In short, the total strategy consisted of intensified surveillance, increased powers of detention and detainment, and an attempt to appropriate modern discourses of democratic nationalism and free, individual choice as means to sustain the order. It was, however, not successful.

3. The aftermath: Articulating a chain of signification
The 1980s saw an increasing fragmentation within the hegemonic bloc. Business leaders got concessions on the National Party traditionally anti-capitalist line, signalling a shift from state intervention in the political economy to an increasing focus on maintaining an orderly social climate for business. The Wiehan report in 1979 recommended easing the long-standing ban on African trade unions in order to prevent wild strikes, and the Riekert Commision advised dismantling white job reservation while maintaining a rigorous control on influx to the cities. Complusory primary eduction was also introduced, though multiracial schools could only be run privately. Public amenities, such as hotels, restaurants and theatres, were no longer compulsorily segregated. In line with the 'total strategy', these measures were introduced to "intensify class differentials while reducing racial ones" (Hyslop 1988, Worden 1994), or, in a word, to make it possible to preserve entrenched social division within a global discourse of 'fair capitalism'.

With the failure of the tricameral constitution and intensified sanctions from the international community, FW de Klerk was may have been put in power with the task of dismantling the apartheid state as quietly and gracefully as possible. Hence, by the time the multiracial Mass Democratic Movement launched their civil disobedience campaign (the first sign of a major movement against the regime that included large numbers of those who had benefitted from it), the National Party was already busy repealing some of its most unpopular measures, such as the banning of ANC and PAC, the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the colonization of Namibia. In 1991 the Group Areas, Land and Population Registration Acts were repealed, and the CODESA negotiations instituted. After South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994, Nelson Mandela and the ANC took over as custodians of the South African state.

Let's fast forward a bit, to Thursday August 16, 2001. We are at a racism conference in the Western Cape province, an event held in conjunction with global UN conference on racism to be held in Durban, South Africa, later in the month. In Durban, leaders of states, international organizations and NGO will give well-meaning speeches on their fight on the scourge on racism. Tonight, however, we are about to witness Wanda Stoffberg taking the stage. She has been running the butchery Vleis Paleis in George, on the South African garden route, in face of increasing protests from neighbouring small- holders. As she serves a predominantly black clientele, her neighbours have successfully petitioned the local zoning authorities, controlled by the Democratic Alliance, to have her butchery closed. Stoffberg, in return, contacted the local branch of the ANC to recruit their support, and announced as much in the local newspaper. Tonight she will tell of the reaction from her local community.

At the gate of her smallholding, two men attacked her from behind, hitting, kicking and throttling her. Then one of them, who she saw from his hand was a white man, carved a "K" into her left breast.

"He said: This is a message from our boss. Those were his exact words. And kaffirboeties like me can't stay in George." The men said the "K" was "because I'm a kaffir-lover".

While goodwill prevails among ordinary people, she says, white supremacist attitudes had been forced on whites during the apartheid reign.

> As a child growing up in Beaufort West racism was "force-fed" to her every
> day of her life and at one stage she was even scared of black people.
>
> "One day you wake up and realise you have been part of something so bad
> and so wrong, for so long."
>
> People felt guilty when they realised this. Some ignored the guilt but
> others chose to deal with it.
>
> She said she had reservations about coming to speak at the conference,
> "but I decided to stand up for the truth for once in my life, a truth
> which many of us are still in denial of.
>
> "We should not tolerate any form of discrimination or racism in our
> country. The perpetrators should be punished. This is the humble message I
> want to bring to you," she said.
>
> "I want something positive to come from this. We are a nation in the
> process of healing... and I learned and believed today there are enough
> people in this country with goodwill to heal this country."
>
> Stoffberg, sitting on the stage after delivering her testimony, later
> broke down as another victim of a racist attack, Zola Plaatjie, wept as he
> was describing how he was assaulted by whites in Milnerton, Cape Town.
(http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=13&click_id=13&art_id=qw99796494157 0B653&set_id=1)

I am not suggesting here to view 1994, the year of South Africa's first parliamentary elections under general suffrage, as a moment of democratic redemption, of sorts, in the history of the country. Confining the practices with which apartheid is associated to the past enables the type of "current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible [which] is not philosophical," as Benjamin demonstrates. By allowing the present to be defined as a state of emergency, it performs as the rule of which fascism becomes a normal expression. "One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm," Benjamin notes in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (249). With Benjamin, it might be necessary to work in tandem with two different notions of time. The dominant notion of time, the "homogeneous, empty" version, would perceive fascism as an aberrant form of politics, and, consequently, confirm the normality of the hegemonic formation.

Against this temporal conception, Benjamin holds the thought-image [Denkbild, in Weigel 162] of the "angel of history," a figure, who, while facing the past, is propelled backwards by "a storm blowing from Paradise" into the future, "while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress" (Benjamin, 249).

*1 The categories that became dominant towards the end of the apartheid epoch was "white/European," "coloured," "Indian" and "African." These categories were of course highly problematic, both in their implementations and conceptualizations.

*2 By this time, the theological justifications for white rule was of less importance. Dominantly, the situation was articulated as one of an embattled agent of order against a sea of disorder and chaos.

Diderik Humble jr. had just finished his letter to the editor of TRU Times, complaining that his mentor and benefactor in spe Darwin P. Johnson had been misinterpellated as Darwin P. Erlandsen, “a wholly different animal altogether,” in Humble’s own words. “Darwin will not take lightly on this mistake on your part, and may be persuaded to take legal precautions to have such gross misrepresentation rectified,” Humble had written, well aware of Johnson’s generosity to his friends.

Only last week Humble had to ask his sickly mother, stored away, as she was, in a barn somewhere in the Middle Kingdom, to extend him a small grant, “for a new coat,” as he put it. It was dire times for Humble, even though he had succumbed to the call to join the new corporation. For one, he had been unable to have his interjection on the debate on Solyaris. I was bending paper clips, rolling cigarettes ferociously, trying to know something about the movie, all the while Diderik repeated the same phrases, “Allow me to interject,” and “Not to be presumptious or facetious in any way, but,” and so on. I asked him to write his ideas down, if he could find the time in between composing his Compleat Theory of the World and Everything Else (Vol. I). Last night I received this note in my post box:

Curious the way Tristero placed those two post horns on the wall in Tarkovsky’s Solyaris. Wonder if those horns are there in the new American version?

I had already passed my remarks on the movie to the TRU Times, and, not having seen “the new American version,” saw no reason to post an addendum. Instead, I sent him an text message, inviting him out for a cup of tea at The Spectre of Kabool.

It was a seedy joint, crammed with the usual racket of hypocrites, do-gooders and other bleeding heart liberals. We found a table in the darkest corner of the bar, where only the occasional prostitute would pop by, thinking we might just be some potential paying customers. When she saw us, she would invariably turn on her heels, displaying a somewhat repulséd look.

When Diderik finally arrived, he was not alone. Sinsemilla, his estanged wife, came stumbling through the door, holding on to the sleeve of his jacket, behind his ghostly apparition, like some shadow of a metaphor.

“Stop it now, Sinsemilla. I said you could come with,” Diderik started.

“What is she doing here,” I said, staring directly at Diderik.

“She wouldn’t be left alone.”

“I thought you said you’d killed her. Killed her good.”

“I thought I had. But I hadn’t. Or so it seems.”

Sinsemilla needed to use the restroom, and Diderik had to come along. He couldn’t leave her alone. He’d brought a thick brown envelope to the bar, and left in on the table while he was escorting Sinsemilla. I looked at it thoroughly, considering whether it could be some primordial version of the manuscript he’d been working on. I glanced around furtively, and quickly slid the envelope into my lap.

Diderik Humble jr.'s thesis

Laertes in his «Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers» notes that «When somebody asked Heraclit to decree some rules, she showed no interest because the government of the city was already bad. Instead, she went to the temple and played dices with children. Finally she withdrew from the world , and lived in the mountains feeding on grasses and plants. However, having fallen in this way into dropsy she came down to town and asked the doctors in a riddle if they could make a drought out of rainy weather. When they did not understand she buried herself in a cow-stall, expecting that the dropsy would be evaporated by the heat of the manure; but even so she failed to effect anything, and ended her life at the age of sixty».

I managed to slip the manuscript back into the envelope and slide it back onto the table just in time for Diderik not to notice. I think. He pushed his body over the floor, dragging his ghost behind him like some metaphoric shadow.

“Stop it now, Sinsemilla. I said you could come with,” Diderik said.

What is I fighting for?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the

Why is the walrus such a bore?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the

What am I but a metaphor?

I fought the law but the law one,
I fought the law I fought for fun
I fought the law but the law won.
I fought the law but the