Benightment

A fallen self who keeps getting up

(A fallen self who keeps getting up again)

“The artist’s task is to save the soul of mankind; and anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.  If artists cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
– Terence McKenna

“To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast must I adore?

What holy image is attacked?

What hearts must I break?

What lie must I maintain?

In what blood tread?”

– Rimbaud

………………………………………………..

City of Bones.

Silent in the caves and caverns, 

sleeping long forgotten,

tucked deep under steel and concrete,

lay my bones, my cold and dry ancestral bones.

I know my bones

calling from undocumented histories.

And when bones come up as they do,

 an eternity of souls sigh, yeah they never stop whispering.

Offering their secrets to me, 

trapped somewhere inbetween, 

where the symbol meets substance and ideas seed potential.

If I squint, I can see the tellers of the obvious,

though my eyes are imitations with limitations,

until I fly into my eternal night,

spinning colours unimagined, telling stories never heard 

with words that will change the atmosphere.

It’s cold in here but the apprehension’s lovely

watching and waiting, 

catching a glimpse of what precedes the manifested.

Their souls take shape in trees and clouds

these ancient ones.

I’m just a passing cloud that exists in dissipation with the wind.

When I’m very still I remember myself 

Laid to rest in the before and after of a story that never stops.

It never stops, 

falling from dumb lips, 

striving to be heard

the dead love to talk.

They’re convincing too but I’m barely real.

A glitch, a spark, a twitch.

A perfectly faulty entity

the gods know me well.

Omnipresent as dust,

they write secrets in my blood –

It’s caked on the tips of their fingers,

and fills small spaces.

And here are my bones,

Still and silent as the end of chaos.

……………………………………………….

Politics, media and the unfettered free market economy

 We don’t mix God with politics                                                 

“Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. If we can’t think up reasons of our own, we always have the God bullshit.” Chayefsky 1976 

While architecture, music, fine arts and literature owe much to religious inspiration and patronage, average interpretations of religion are at best fluffy, delusional and mediocre and at worst elitist, despotic and depraved.  Politics is by nature an extension of religion but without God. We ‘don’t do God’ in Australian politics (Jensen 2016). However, the similarity between conservative politics and religion is undeniable and is particularly the case with neoliberal driven politics. It has its own catechisms in accordance with an exalted code of conduct, has universal ambitions, is buoyed by a legal system, which has trampled the meek and the vulnerable and directs its benefits almost exclusively toward a powerful elite. It even has a prophet in Friedrich Von Hayek and its church is the The Mont Pelerin Society (Ponniah 2012) This demiurge passes control of its pilfered resources to its undeserving progeny in an act of contemptuous nepotism. Australian politics is presently in a death-grip with Mammon, the lord of economics, king of all wars and hence the most prolific serial killer of all time. The total deaths in recorded history now number the hundreds of millions (White 2014).

Humanity’s social movements may originate from well-intentioned philosophies but they have a knack of morphing into messy, complex political counterfeits.

Politics walks a fine line between the truth and bullshit.

Mass media follows the corporate imperative

“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale.” Chayefsky 1976

There is significant mainstream confusion, deliberate or otherwise, surrounding definitions of democracy in capitalist societies. Democratic intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky are relentlessly misrepresented in their defense of social democratic ideology, despite his commitment to raise the lamp and shine a light into the darkness that is not ahead of us, but in the here and now. Some Western journalists have portrayed social democracy as a form of either socialism or communism, adding to the confusion within Western ideological and political debates. If a political ideology is open to interpretation then political ideologies are like godless extensions of religious dogma, and in a capitalist free-market state, the definition of a political ideology is limited to the parameters of the dominant economic forces that influence government policy making. These economic forces navigate corporate mass media, influencing and manipulating public opinion to the benefit of the state, the free market and its own neoliberal economic agendas.  Mass media follows corporate imperatives, filtered to assure conformity to the interests and needs of an elite private sector. Media networks that do not tow the line are pushed aside in favour of those who support the corporate ‘social purpose’ (Chomsky 1990). Transnational media operates within the limits of a market-driven satellite news oligopoly. The spectacle of distant violence and suffering sells, hence it is prioritised and produced to suit the demands and tastes of a Western audience while serving largely shadowy private interests (Chouliaraki 2008).

The Twin towers & disaster capitalism

“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad” Chayefsky 1976

Since the events of September 11 2001, political violence has touched every Western nation to some degree. Aired and viewed in real time on our screens and portable devices, 9/11 was mediated, analysed and officially concluded, despite valid questions from professional observers, who have raised their concerns about the physical events of 9/11 (Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth 2016). Humanity has been collectively traumatised by a series of shocks, imparted with precision by transnational media (Chouliaraki 2008). Between shocks, we return to our daily lives, our families, our careers and our pursuits as if nothing has changed. We ask few questions and receive fewer answers, while obediently following the edicts of our governments that are being hijacked by a devolving neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism seeks nothing less than the transfer of all public goods and services to the private sector, undermining the significant social and economic achievements of capitalist societies like Australia (Chomsky 2015). The post 9/11 period accelerated the global spread of neoliberal principles, using Naomi Klein’s term; disaster capitalism with resistance viewed as an obstruction to progress (Klein 2007).  Symbolically our electricity (power) is all but privatised and we are expected to buy into the neoliberal free-market philosophy, complacently entrusting our health services, our educational institutions and our social security into the hands of a corporate sector, which packages its booty with slick advertising campaigns and media propaganda. Western governments continue to play the terrorist card as a political ace. It is a transparent system, yet populations dutifully adopt robotic conformity, wearing corporatocracy like a snug suit because they cannot see the details.

Le cirque de 9/11

“You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell” Chayefsky 1976

Hiram Johnson said in 1917 that the first casualty in war is truth (Bagdikian 2004). Rumours of war cause social, hence economic panic and a proliferation of propaganda, at a time when people need accurate and balanced information, but is this what governments and media deliver?  The ‘War on Drugs’ rolled out the red carpet for the War on Terror, which has since graduated to the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In what amounts to a class war, with the global rich lording it over the global poor, one has to take pause at the power of these terminologies and of the role that mass media plays as vehicles for western propaganda. (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008)  This kind of rhetoric was a bit of a joke when it first appeared; nevertheless it has become embedded in the mainstream political vernacular. 

After the events of September 11 the western world was rocked by an event rarely experienced in a western nation; all of us witnessed the epic drama unfold live via satellite. We may never know the whole truth behind this event however western governments have been riding the wave of an emerging fear culture ever since.  I.F. Stone once explained to a group of ‘green’ journalists, that when covering politics the first thing to consider is that all governments lie (Bagdikian 2004). I remember experiencing an instinctive distrust during 9/11 media coverage. it hit me in my stomach – knowing that this would be used as the motivation for an invasion of Iraq.  It was inevitable and everyone knew it. Media networks covered 9/11 like a bizarre sports event, repeating segments over and over to an international western audience that was dumb struck, horrified, yet too afraid to switch off their televisions. It was reality TV at its finest and marked the global shift from ‘risk society to threat society’ (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008).  Rather than a breaking news event, it was an historical narrative complete with denunciative moral agency and promises of revenge (Chouliaraki 2008). The US Government had the whole world’s attention and they worked it like a circus, with its media ringmasters directing our gaze to wherever it was required.

The Bin Laden/ Hussein adjustment & Weapons of Mass Deception

“You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.” Chayefsky 1976

I cannot erase from my mind the sudden rhetorical switch from Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein in the immediate post 9/11 period.  I kept bringing this up in conversation and alarmingly no one seemed to fully grasp the implications. I understand that people were in shock and have continued to be exposed to successive shocks ever since, so this glaring inconsistency has been lost in the din, forgotten.  Osama Bin Laden was conveniently dropped from the media landscape and Hussein was spliced in as his understudy and no one talked about it much. Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’ had shifted the public attention from one enemy to another, as documented in global news trends covering the pre and post 9/11 period. As the US and her allies prepared the public for war, leaders simply maneuvered their rhetoric through the media (Althaus & Largio 2004).

I had a choice; I could have tuned out and taken solace in my instincts. Nothing would sneak up on me.  I could face reality, at the very least with resignation, yet I looked back at Medusa and turned myself to stone. We marched against the invasion of Iraq but Howard had ignored us, enamoured as he was of George W. who was juicing him up for the coming Free Trade Agreement. Murdoch’s journalists had dutifully underplayed the numbers but I was there. The justification for war was sealed a long time before we’d reached the streets and I think we knew that.

There was no self-critical reflection by journalists when it emerged that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. The media had inadvertently become Weapons of Mass Deception (Nohrstedt & Ottosen 2008), Hussein was conveniently hung and that was that.

Symbolic annihilation of the non-western ‘other’

“There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars” Chayefsky 1976

The non-Western other is only ‘real’ in the social and political sense, while they are being discussed. The moment they are dropped from media discourse they cease to exist. This is the forward thrust of political narcissism, and a convenient distraction from the reality of war, which has stalked Middle Eastern oil fields like the Many-Faced God and his faceless assassins (Game of Thrones, 2016).  Western powers can invade the villainous Orient without contrition and often with impunity under the banner of democracy. They can beam these heroic efforts live via satellite into the amphitheatre of western televisions and we can further access the horror through the Internet on multiple devices 24/7. We rely on easy access to news media to assure us that the threat is contained. The heroes and defenders of western democracy have always been our American heroes, who protect us from the perils of the non-western other. We can go to sleep safely knowing that all is well as long as our American protector is out there, stationed in the vast Australian desert, carefully tending its garden of missiles.

 The people, distracted, will always be divided

“I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.”  Chayefsky 1976

Social media is both an opportunity to unite and a labyrinth of distraction. Castells bubbles with optimism about the potential of social media and its networks for social change, and for shaping a brave new 21^st century (Castells 2015).  As a public space we are still awestruck by the grandeur of the Internet and its transnational social media networks, however from where I’m standing, favour increasingly leans toward the corporate interests of the companies that own them and which profile each user as a consumer and political punter. It is time to realise that Facebook and Google have direct access to enormous amounts of data, akin to having a crystal ball that can predict the future. Predictive analytics (Software and Solutions 2016) reveals collective trends across social, political and economic spectrums.  Anyone who has the money and power to access or ‘mine’ that data, can prepare well in advance to stem the flow of an inconvenient social movement, diverting attention, manipulating opinion, cutting it off at the pass. It remains to be seen what kind of social change the World Wide Web will enable, before I stop feeling like a fat juicy fly.

Australia has a complacent, manageable population with a vulnerable indigenous community. Most of us are migrants or descendants of migrants, with either colonial or post-war histories and the majority of us are quite disinterested in politics – beyond the few weeks that constitute an election and the promises that come with this cyclical ritual. However we have a compulsory voting system with 78% enrolled and 93 % of those voted in the 2013 election (IDEA 2016). The rest of the time we are disengaged from the political process and it’s starting to show. The rise of armchair activism aka ‘Clicktivism’ is the telltale sign of a half-baked democracy.  More people claim to know that the emperor is stark naked yet only a fraction turn up at public protests and less if it’s raining. One could be forgiven for the conclusion that we have fallen into the clutches of a sociopathic corporate ruling class (Chomsky 2001).  In Australia ‘Democracy’ can still parade the streets though only after applying for permission to protest. The naked emperor however has been pirouetting openly for quite a while.

Bearing witness

“Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer” Chayefsky 1976

I formed a close friendship with a Bosnian refugee in my neighbourhood, who now owns his own inner city home and a thriving business.  He arrived in Australia with nothing after losing half of his family in a war that still leaves us with a multitude of unanswered questions. Why did UN peacekeepers disarm the Bosnians, put them all in one place and then leave them to be massacred? World governments knew it was happening, there had been plenty of reports coming out of Bosnia through embedded Western journalists, yet no one saved them (Crossette 1999).

As my friend explained, they waited – but no one came. When his 21-year-old cousin was raped, mortally stabbed and left to die in the boot of her car, they could not help her because snipers took aim at anyone who tried.  The family began covert preparations to move their remaining young members to Italy. The eventual autopsy showed that she had lived for days after the attack, dying just metres from her family in the boot of her car. It is one story among thousands, however it is my dear friend’s story, which brought the reality of war up close and personal.

I searched for online footage of the Bosnian genocide and scoured the Internet for balanced media reports and footage, not because I thought I could change anything or to satisfy morbid curiosity. I was bearing witness for my friend.  

We the Victorious

“No matter how much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he’s going to win.” Chayefsky 1976

The ancient ruins of public blood sport arenas, sacrificial temples and amphitheatres dot the globe. Bloodlust is part of our history, only now the West fights its wars on foreign soil and has military technologies that can destroy the planet in a day. For the West, the line between reality and fiction is blurred, the bloody reality of war is sanitised; therefore we are spared the full shock of war that would precipitate action or transformation (Chouliaraki 2008). The horror is only partially revealed, made palatable for our consumption through largely privatised news networks.  Violence and the threat of violence, disaster and the threat of disaster, poverty and the threat of poverty – the reality is hidden beneath the spectacle.  The Western psyche has been high-jacked by well crafted rhetorical tales of suffering and doom, with the promise that the heroic West will do its utmost to stop it from reaching our shores (Borchers, 2013) after all we are the victorious West. We consume distant suffering like vampires while the media goes into a competitive frenzy over the latest disaster, lingering over every detail. If it cannot report anything new it will pick over the bloodless carcass and endlessly speculate, chat-show style (Thussu, 2003).  In Australia we get a well-managed feast or famine. Produced as infotainment, it is sanitised, sensationalised and de-contextualised to reduce demand on the emotional and cognitive capacities of a western audience (Chouliaraki 2008), or we get nothing at all. 

Wanted: Western audiences – dead or alive

“This is not a psychotic episode. This is a cleansing moment of clarity. I’m imbued, Max.” Chayefsky 1976

One of the primary contributory effects of Western media is the distorted perception the audience forms of a villainous non-western ‘other’ (Kamalipour 2004) and I do occasionally catch myself in fear. I exorcise this demon by carefully observing my reactions to both local and transnational news reports. Nevertheless, I have a dead zone, which can only be resurrected by the realization that I have it, though the alternative is not much better, as compassion turns to empathy and empathy turns to grief.  The Western cultural perspective is etched into my consciousness. It is my operating system.

While I have learned to enjoy a good war epic, it is because actors are playing the roles of heroes and villains that I can rest in that imaginary place of indifference and lose myself in the willing suspension of disbelief.

Epilogue: The devil hides in the detail

“We want a prophet, not a curmudgeon…He should do more apocalyptic doom.” Chayefsky 1976

From the banks of the river, a crocodilian humanoid grinned from its leafy shadows. The hush of water, lapping at the hull had lulled the other passengers into a deep sleep. No one on the boat saw the well-camouflaged reptilian grinning knowingly from the riverbanks.  And the closer I looked the wider it grinned. 

I woke up with the eyes of that creature imprinted in my memory. It was just a dream, set in the dusk of a mental landscape, with me on a long wooden boat, seated on a bench at the stern. When I noticed the creature, I turned to see if anyone else could see it, but all I saw were glassy, faraway stares looking straight ahead. ‘The devil is in the detail’ is my reliable interpretation. My fellow passengers weren’t even aware of each other – they were alone in the crowd, mesmerized by the forward movement of that damned vessel. 

…………………………………………………………

Surveillance in the Garden of Eden

Foreword

This opinion piece looks at key interactions between surveillance, the Internet, mass media and neoliberalism – through a mythological lens. It has a special kind of relevance today, with the Sentient World Simulation program well underway and the Internet of Things. 

The principles, structures and strategies of neoliberal capitalism work together deliberately and opportunistically, for the goal of global, political and economic supremacy – the few ruling the many. However in order for that to occur the masses must be duped into agreement.  

This essay looks at surveillance and the manipulation of consent as an evolving phenomenon, raising existential questions about freedom, authenticity and meaning, while reflecting on the allegorical narrative of Adam and Eve, the utopic Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Knowledge.

Methodology

There are so many aspects to the topic of surveillance that it’s difficult to narrow down a theme for exploration.  I settled on writing a dialectic opinion piece that draws inspiration for research from two versions of the Adam and Eve creation myth; from Genesis and the Nag Hammadi.

The Garden of Eden is used as a context for discussing surveillance, the manipulation of consent and neoliberalism, but it’s also a narrative device.

I  define my interpretations of two versions of the cross-cultural creation myth, with a comparative analysis sourced from various translations.  I sourced and reviewed a broad range of literature – from academic journals, technical journals, fiction and non-fiction books, news media, religious literature, social and philosophical works, government publications and websites.

I’ve included in-text hyperlinks.

Civil disobedience in the Garden of Eden

The mainstream Christian myth of Adam and Eve has the hapless couple living in ignorance and tilling the garden grounds until a snake tempts Eve to eat from the forbidden ‘Tree of Knowledge for both good and evil’. They are then expelled from the Garden for disobeying ‘God’ and to stop them from eating from the ‘Tree of Life’, which would grant immortality, however according to the gnostic Nag Hammadi, this garden variety god is not the true ‘God” it is a false god, a god of lies.  In the gnostic version the imposter is the god of slavery, surveillance and control (The Gnostic Society Library, 2003) that has imprisoned a spark of the divine consciousness in matter. Adam and his savior Eve; the divine feminine archetype, escape the prison of ignorance by eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of both good and evil.   In the Nag Hammadi creation myth the fall of Adam and Eve represents human consciousness waking from the dreamstate and escaping from the false god’s illusory utopia (Davies, 2005). Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden by an imposter god is a symbol of the awakening human psyche that has within it the knowledge for both good and evil. Up until that moment, Adam is a sleepwalke, ignorant of any possibilities outside the garden of the jealous god, known to gnostic Christians as the Demiurge. Eve awakens first from the dream and saves Adam from eternal ignorance. They have awakened from the appearance of freedom and autonomy. The Garden of Eden can be interpreted as a description of a totalitarian surveillance state. Adam and Eve are under the dominating gaze of God and just like Bentham’s panoptic design; the garden exists to serve God’s meticulous all-seeing power (Foucault, 1980).

Everybody Knows

Our ‘free’ capitalist societies increasingly engage in covert mass surveillance and data retention, allegedly for public safety and security, but we know it’s really for profit and power, as Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism in 2013, and the anonymous leak of the ‘Panama Papers’ in 2015 clearly revealed. The significance of this covert activity is reflected in the time, effort, money and resources that have gone into government investigations on Julian Assange for allegedly having had sex with a broken condom (The Assange Agenda, 2017).  Since then, mainstream media has moved on and the masses in the Garden of Eden seem curiously passive, putting in little resistance beyond ‘Clickivism’, and generally reacting as if it were all just a show.

“The end result is the degradation of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events” (White, 2010).  Democracy is in grave danger and everybody knows it, yet most of us are passively disengaged, living the spectacle through our devices and projected images, where we connect through the Tree of Knowledge that occupies the centre of the Garden of Eden.  

Debord wrote that the spectacle presents itself as the unquestionable and inaccessible reality that demands our passive acceptance, which is already imposed by the spectacle’s monopoly of appearances.  In short it’s everywhere;

“The tautological character of the spectacle stems from the fact that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the globe, endlessly basking in its own glory.” (Debord, 1967)

The battle for minds amidst the spectacle

Unfettered deregulated capitalism is a lot like the demiurge of the Garden of Eden. It presents itself as the only viable system and traps its subjects by presenting itself as the ideal, free society.   As the inhabitants of the garden we find it increasingly difficult to imagine an alternative reality because we have come to believe there is no other way.  Our systems have become the “vast inaccessible realities that can never be questioned” (Debord 1967). We are complacent and live in denial,  despite our knowledge of increasing levels of control that are gradually undermining our democratic values and narrowing all avenues for community empowerment. Civil rights are systematically dismantled over time to protect the financial institutions that dominate society and to make citizen dissent more difficult.  Elaborate propaganda is disseminated through mass media over generations, creating a political void of disinterest yet our societies and experiences are shaped by political decisions made for us despite our civil disengagement, which is very convenient for those with the power and influence to drive political decisions and policy making. It appears to be a long-term strategy that uses both deliberation and opportunism. Governments, which have traditionally represented the will of the people, are undermined with the help of a highly concentrated ownership of mass media and the global political elites they serve (Herman & Chomsky, 1988).  Governments have come to represent the will of those who own the means of production, who control the resources, hold the majority of wealth and who can influence public opinion.  Over time, the control of state assets are transferred into private hands under the guise of cost effective management and better efficiency. This is never the outcome however, and this push is propelled by a radical squeeze on workers rights and conditions – slipped in under the guise of ‘flexible labour markets’.  The commodification of poverty is made so much easier because there are less who will, or can speak for them. People are busy surviving and dealing with a cumulative, massive increase in information – coupled with a strategic shift of responsibility from those in positions of power – to the individual citizen, or rather ‘consumer’.

The majority is self-occupied and fighting to retain composure in a system that is designed to covertly transfer power to a minority elite. More people are being born into servitude than at any other time, with 45.8 million people trapped in some form of slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2016).  Few find their way out of their appointed stations in life in a fiercely competitive, profit-driven system (Loewenstein, 2015).  The appearance of our society may have changed with new technologies that once had the promise of making life fairer and easier, but the agenda has remained the same. Set the masses fighting amongst themselves, give them an imagined enemy other and flow all benefits into the hands of a few. 

Debord wrote: “Contemporary society is both the meaning and the agenda of our particular socio-economic formation. It is the historical moment in which we are caught” (Debord, 1967)

The rise of the immortal gods: Mass surveillance & God’s Panopticon: (why people accept it)

Forms of surveillance, political propaganda and totalitarian control have existed for thousands of years, it is a part of human history. Foucault’s panopticon became the leading metaphor for surveillance studies among scholars and then an odd thing occurred, scholars got bored with it, or overwhelmed with surveillance studies, becoming “haunted by its omnipresence”(Caluya, 2010).  For me the panopticon is an overtly religious concept and represents humanity’s desire for protection by an omnipotent deity, which has existed ideologically in human consciousness from the beginnings of civilisation, then institutionalised as a means for regulating conduct through its moral discourses (Foucault, 2007).  Debord wrote: “The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion” (Debord, 1967).

Rapidly evolving technologies mean those who own the means of production can replace the idea of God, who has seemingly failed to protect us from evil, with a god-like system that uses surveillance technologies as the structure of an all-seeing eye, which in many ways positions the Internet as the mind of God.  Satellite angels covering the four corners of the globe and everywhere in-between complete the picture with their capacity for omniscience. This omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity is always under construction. It is in a state of constant flux, ready to shape shift into whatever appearance the masses will accept and endorse. Its survival and growth requires the participation of the masses, which are now dependent on it.  The World Wide Web has been cast.  The many have put their knowledge together and collectively given power to the new system, a cyberspace that functions like the mind of God.  I am not saying this is a bad thing – it is as good or bad as the intentions of the people who are using the technology, and the direction it will take is yet to be determined. However the struggle is clearly apparent and looks for all purposes to be a struggle between good and evil.

The networked Tree of Knowledge

The Internet has always needed produsers (Bruns, 2007) and open participation to build the Internet’s knowledge base and has simultaneously created a data-based crystal ball into the hearts and minds of humanity.   Bruns described Web 2.0 or social software as part of an important paradigm shift that would profoundly impact upon social practices, legal and economic frameworks, the media and democratic society. Back in 2007 this shift was poorly theorized and understood (Bruns, 2007).  The excitement and positivity with which some intellectuals and academics have approached the new world order of things is admirable however the intellectual elitism that plagues some of the brightest minds of our time is democracy’s Achilles heel. While basking in their own brilliance, complex theories and terminologies, they seem to be ignoring the dark undercurrent of neoliberal opportunism and a quiet militaristic supremacy, which is whisking humanity toward its new dystopian destiny. State protections industries are not just protecting their citizens or their established geographical borders, but also the state’s ‘economic interests’.

Surveillance is a key component of intelligence and espionage. The Internet was spawned from a military communications technology called ARPANET, a prototype for the Internet that began as a memo nearly 50 years ago (DARPA, 2017).

It is said that no one owns the Internet – but that depends on the definition of owning – i.e. if I had free access to all the data generated through the Internet, and if I could decrypt and store that data or capture it before it was encrypted for later reference, then in a sense I would own the Internet. Then there’s the access that gatekeepers such as Telstra control, if you don’t pay your bill then you have no access to the net. The greatest value of the Internet is in the information it contains but also in its capacity for the capture, communication and dissemination of that information and the ensuing influence of ideas.

The whistleblowers of our time are in great danger and for good reason. Governments do not want people focusing on that side of our global system operations, however, information settles in strange and fascinating ways in the human psyche and the effects of the panopticon works in both directions. The focus can also go from the many to the few. In countries like China, where slavery is rife (Global slavery Index, 2016) and the memory of revolution is relatively fresh, media and online censorship is a priority (Muller, 2004).  Naturally, western capitalist governments, as directed by the private political elites and their corporate agendas,  periodical push for Internet censorship citing citizen safety and national security. The Demiurge does not want us eating from the Tree of Knowledge or spreading our own ideas too freely.

The mirror reality

 (to be completed)

Afterword

We have never lost the desire or the drive to create a utopian society, however, what is heaven for some is hell to others and all attempts so far have been at the expense of truth, freedom and individual privacy.  Despite resistance there is also a loss of authenticity, because any individual or group that resists oppression by the dominant ideology is also in danger of being cast as the enemy other or worse, becomes mesmerised and lost in the plethoric distraction of information.  

The Internet is the manifest appearance of the mythical Tree of Knowledge, placed at the centre of our societies with networked branches that reach around the globe. As we awaken from the dream, what we do with the knowledge of good and evil will determine our future and the future of our planet.

ref:

Bruns, A.  2007. Produsage, generation C, and their effects on the democratic process.

Bruns, A.  2007,  ‘Produsage’, Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition pp. 99-106. ACM.

Caluya, G.  2010, ‘The post-panoptic society? Reassessing Foucault in surveillance studies’, Social Identities, vol 16, no. 9, pp. 621-633.

DARPA,  2017,  DARPA And The Internet Revolution, Waldrop, M. Pdf, viewed June 10, 2017, a href=”http://www.darpa.mil”>http://www.darpa.mil”>http://www.darpa.mil >

Davies, S. 2005, The Gnostic Society Library, ‘The Secret Book of John, translation & annotation  Stevan Davies,  Skylight Paths Publishing, pp 9-14.

Debord, G. 2012. Society of the Spectacle. Bread and Circuses Publishing.

Foucault, M. 1980,  ‘Power/knowledge’in C. Gordon (ed), Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977,  New York: Pantheon.

Dunlevy, G. 2017, ‘UNSW-Harvard scientists unveil a giant leap for anti-ageing’, Newsroom UNSW Sydney, viewed June 10 2017, a href=”http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/unsw-harvard-scientists-unv&#8230″>http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/unsw-harvard-scientists-unveil-giant-leap-anti-ageing”>http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/unsw-harvard-scientists-unv… >

Foucault, M. 2007, Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Springer.

George, A.  2016, ‘Jung in the Garden of Eden: A Myth of the Transformation of Human Consciousness’, Depth Insights: Seeing The World With Soul, vol. 9, Viewed June 2017, a href=”http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/jung-in&#8230″>http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/jung-in-the-garden-of-eden-a-myth-of-the-transformation-of-consciousness-arthur-george-j-d/%3E”>http://www.depthinsights.com/Depth-Insights-scholarly-ezine/jung-in…;

Global Slavery Index, 2016,  Global Findings, viewed June 15 2017, a href=”https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/&gt”>https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/%3E”>https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/findings/>;

Herman, E.S. & Chomsky,  N. 1988, Manufacturing Consent.

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (IGIJ), 2017, The Panama Papers: Politicians, Criminals, and the Rogue Industry That Hides Their Cash,  viewed June 18 2017, a href=”https://www.icij.org&gt”>https://www.icij.org%3E”>https://www.icij.org>;

Jinman, R. 2013, ‘NSA spy scandal boosts sales of Orwell’s ‘1984’ – here’s why’,  The Week UK,  12 June,  viewed 13 June 2017, a href=”http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/prism-leak/53565/nsa-spy-scanda&#8230″>http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/prism-leak/53565/nsa-spy-scandal-boosts-sales-orwells-1984-heres-why#ixzz2vD3BoLI0%3E”>http://www.theweek.co.uk/world-news/prism-leak/53565/nsa-spy-scanda…;.

Jung, C.G. 1954. ‘Adam and Eve’, Collected works, 14.

Loewenstein, A. 2015,  Disaster Capitalism,  Verso Books.

Muller,  M. 2004,  Who Owns the Internet – Ownership as a Legal Basis for American Control of the Internet. Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent, p. 709.

Preiss, J. & Handler, P. 1957, Enzymatic synthesis of nicotinamide mononucleotide.

Stockbauer, B. 1999, ‘Gnostic Christianity and the Myth of Sophia’, viewed June 15 2017, a href=”http://www.essene.com/Gospels/GnosticAndSophia.html&gt”>http://www.essene.com/Gospels/GnosticAndSophia.html%3E”>http://www.essene.com/Gospels/GnosticAndSophia.html>;

The Assange Agenda 2017,  Surveillance Transparency And You, 2017, a href=”http://theassangeagenda.com&gt”>http://theassangeagenda.com%3E”>http://theassangeagenda.com>;

The Gnostic Jesus, Adam and Eve, viewed June 15 2017 a href=”http://gnostic-jesus.com/gnostic-jesus/Overview/adam-and-eve.html&gt”>http://gnostic-jesus.com/gnostic-jesus/Overview/adam-and-eve.html”>http://gnostic-jesus.com/gnostic-jesus/Overview/adam-and-eve.html>

The Gnostic Society Library, 2003,  The fall of Adam, viewed June 15 2017, a href=”http://gnosis.org/naghamm/adam-barnstone.html&gt”>http://gnosis.org/naghamm/adam-barnstone.html%3E”>http://gnosis.org/naghamm/adam-barnstone.html>;

 Wallace I.  2013, ‘Militarizing the Internet’ The National Interest, viewed June 10 2017 a href=”http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/militarizing-the-internet-8734&gt”>http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/militarizing-the-internet-8734″>http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/militarizing-the-internet-8734>

White, M.  2010, ‘Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism’ The Guardian, viewed June 2017 a href=”https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-r&#8230″>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism%3E”>https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-r…;  

……………………………………………..

The Ballad of Briony Reed

We had an s-shaped grove of Celtis Australis in the middle of the city, just five minutes from the CBD and we fought to protect it. That’s how I met her. Saving the trees. 

Briony Reed lived in a bedsit behind my place back when the old Hackberry trees were still standing. We could never accept that leaf-free guttering and flat pavers were more important than fifteen-metre trees, or the owls, the magnificent owls. We spent the good part of a decade protecting the trees. They called us the ‘tree ladies’.  She wrote the petitions and got them signed. I wrote emails to Land and Housing Corporation (LHAC) and the council.  I exchanged information with the Powerful Owl Society too. We did our best to stop LAHC from chopping them down. We held them to account at every turn. You needed signed approvals and council permits to even trim a tree in our vicinity. But in the end, they got them.

Powerful Owls need a twenty-five-kilometre hunting radius and an old growth habitat to mate. A pair of them began using the grove as a stopover between Centennial Park and the Botanic Gardens. Our trees had matured enough to suit the owls and we had a rat plague that year.

Great rat-hunters owls. The first time I saw one I was woken at dawn by a cacophony of birds desperately mobbing the apex predator outside the bedroom window. I heard a woeful ‘woooo-hoo’ in the dead of night a few times but never figured out what made the sound. I was surprised to see an owl perched in the Celtis, its branches stretched over the kitchen roof. I lived in an 1850’s two-storey terrace and the kitchen was added to the back of it some time in the sixties. I could climb onto the roof from my bedroom window.  I wanted to protect the owl under the mistaken belief it was in danger. The owl’s eyes were closed as it rocked rhythmically from side to side. With lightning speed it snatched a magpie that got too close with one talon, broke the magpie’s neck, and dangled it over the branch until dusk. They don’t eat until dusk. For the rest of the day the birds squawked and swooped from further out. I sat in awe of that stunning bird for hours, its golden eyes looked into my soul with apparent disdain. I liked being on the roof. We had a solid wooden stepladder that leaned against the back of the house. I acquired it when Land & Housing Corp (LAHC) closed a split-levelled community garden. It took two men to carry it over.

         I didn’t go to paddy’s market – that could wait.  I didn’t work on my series of abstracts, which I named Palimpsest, not from any sense of cleverness but because I couldn’t afford fresh canvases. I’d sanded back some failures and worked over the top of them. I took a large sketchpad, a brush, some ink, and made an attempt to catch the beauty of its lines, but every stroke failed. I’d been painting for twenty years but I couldn’t capture the essence of an owl. 

At dusk, the owl devoured the magpie. It left a small pile of feathers on the roof. They fell one by one, landing with a gentle turn. I watched its eyes widen when a couple strolled past in the laneway with their small fluffy dog. I watched it extend its enormous wings and dive from the branch – gliding without a sound after sunset. It turned a full slow circle. Owls really are like cats with wings; the way their feathers are designed and arranged they make no sound at all and move like shadows. The owl looked big when perched on the branch but in flight it doubled in length. The Powerful Owl grows up to sixty-five centimetres long and its wingspan is one hundred and sixty five centimetres.

         Briony asked for a detailed description of the experience. In the days that followed she asked me to tell her again and again, reacting each time as if it was the first. She knew it was rare; she knew how privileged we were to have an old-growth micro-forest next to our homes in urban Sydney. She blamed the loss of it on our nasty old neighbours, who complained endlessly about the dangers of trees at community meetings. These unfortunate souls are terrified of tripping on an uplifted paver, slipping on leaf mulch or of being hit by a falling branch.

         ‘Mavis nearly fell over her walker last week’

         ‘The roots are lifting the pavers, I tripped over one.’

         ‘And what with all the storms we’ve been having!’

         ‘If someone gets hit with a falling branch there’ll be hell to pay.’                    

 ‘Why don’t you just dig a hole now and get in?’ Briony was the master of the upward eye-roll.

        It was around midnight. I say around because the fact that it was right on midnight sounds too far-fetched. I was at my computer, about to surf for articles on the mythological significance of owls when I heard an unusual sound, a cat-like screech. The Internet was dial-up then and the connection began with that wild modulated tonal sequence that let you know if you were successful or not. It was dead on midnight. The back door was open. I wasn’t sure of what I’d heard but I got up to check and heard it again.

         We had a very tall cactus halfway down the courtyard, and perched on the very top of it was an owl. Not a Powerful Owl, a much smaller one, with a white heart-shaped face and eyes bright as fire. I didn’t want to frighten it. I took small slow steps and sat down less than a metre away. It was an Eastern Barn Owl. I sat there admiring the lovely creature, talking to it. They have a different gaze to the Powerful Owl, there’s none of the disdain. It had an intense warmth and curiosity to it’s stare. I was transfixed, and had the heightened feeling of presence you get when something special is happening. There was no doubt in my mind. It was a significant metaphysical event and I was not a stranger to meaningful coincidence. The appearance of another owl of a different species and this time at night, took me by surprise. What were the chances? I crept back inside to grab the camera but by the time I returned the owl had gone. I went back to my computer. An owl’s call is believed, in some cultures, to be a bad omen.

           It happened quickly. I got home one afternoon and the trees were gone. I wept like a baby.  I went on a rampage. I  called every person I thought relevant. I wrote angry emails demanding explanations. I stomped around with a copy of the city’s tree policy and guidelines, waving them under the nose of anyone who’d listen. Briony comforted me. She was the stronger one.

         We heard the workers grinding the stumps at the roots and feeding fresh cut limbs to their chippers. It was a moment of total defeat for us and the owls were foremost on my mind. I didn’t think every sighting of an owl somewhere was an omen but I knew my sightings were.

              In one day our world had changed. Our sight-lines altered forever, birdsongs and the soothing rustle of wind through leaves obliterated.

The new light was harsh exposing grim neglected buildings and brickwork. The drawl of addicts arguing over deals in the laneway replaced birdsong. Domestic arguments and brutish cackling reverberated from wall to wall into our windows. The smell of sawdust angered me, and there was a terrible silence that night. Briony called it a void. We heard possums bickering over a lone Jacaranda. We sat silent and still over a pot of tea in Briony’s bedsit. Without the trees, her windows looked directly into my bedroom, ‘Fuck. We can have conversations across the lane now. Save money on phone calls.’

         ‘Great idea! We’ll use our Tibetan bells to get each others attention’ she murmured. I said the idea had a nice ring to it. She perked up a bit. We spent so much time together in that bedsit. It was filled with paperwork. Petitions, reports, photocopies of emails, letters of support, peer-reviewed articles on vulnerable species,  articles on trees and wellbeing, on trees and the reduction of violence. They were stacked on every available surface representing years of futile effort and commitment. Our friendship had been bound in it.

         I walked into an empty night and pushed my hand deep into the hole where a tree had been. I pushed my arm in to the elbow and cried bitterly. It was still hot with the spirit of the tree. It stayed warm for days. I saw less of Briony without our common goal, though I still dropped in for tea and a chat and to play with her mice from time to time. She bred fancy mice of every colour in generous cages on her patio. She’d take one out in the basket of her motorised wheelchair. She was very fond of the silky inquisitive creatures. I took a liking to a black and white spotted pair though I could never trust old Hazzy-Bear around them. He’d already eaten a few but Briony was a good sport about it.

         ‘It’s his natural instinct’, she’d say, ‘cats can’t help it’ and then give the remains a decent burial. She wore mice on her shoulders like brooches and let them snuggle in her long auburn hair and nestle in her pockets. She’d bring one out mid-conversation, nuzzle it lightly nose to nose and speak in a twee mouse-like voice.

         Briony had lost a leg. She was a professional masseuse when a large drunken client fell and crushed her knee. It turned gangrenous. She had four surgeries over twelve months, each one took a little more of her leg until it reached the top of her thigh near the hip making it nearly impossible to be fitted comfortably with a prosthetic limb. She’d given up trying. She said her whole spine was out of whack, that her entire skeletal structure was gradually coming apart. She found it harder doing things and getting around. It was painful. Especially the missing limb, unbearable at times but her tiny friends distracted her from pain. She didn’t like taking pain medication, ‘it dulls the mind’. She said she’d rather die than end up in a nursing home.

         I remember asking about the man in the dusty photo frames on her shelf. It was her former fiancé who broke their engagement and vanished when she lost her leg at the knee. They were an attractive couple that loved to jog, climb, swim, sail or go kayaking. He was in finance. They spent their holidays scaling cliffs, sailing his yacht or rafting remote forest gorges. Briony was an exceptionally beautiful woman back then; tall, lithe, graceful. I wondered if that made the situation harder to bear. At forty-five she was still beautiful, just a little overweight from being wheelchair bound as there were fewer home services then. She couldn’t afford private care and was estranged from her family. Briony could be difficult, belligerent, and her family had distanced themselves. I knew what that was like. My family was more trouble than I could handle, taking the opportunity to torture me every Christmas – My father who lives in the past in a state of perpetual disappointment. My sister with her habit of misinterpreting everything I say because she never listens. Mum, off with the fairies and my brother busy chasing his kids around the backyard. Every Christmas Dad whinges that I never visit, yet I can count the number of times they’ve visited me on one hand.

             With the trees gone I helped Briony pack paperwork into boxes. We stacked them against a wall. She draped a long piece of silk over them and put a statue of Vishnu on top. Two wooden lotus bowls filled with coloured glass were placed on either side.

She gave me two of her favourite books, Musrum and The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. I still have them with her name hand-written in the cover. Briony was generous by nature but I felt something was wrong at the time. I said, ‘You’re not thinking of killing yourself are you?’ She laughed too heartily and said she didn’t have the guts to. I remember standing at her front door, old books in hand, looking at her. She was at her table leaning on her crutch wearing one of her long Indian skirts. It was black and burnt sienna and had elephants printed around the bottom.

         ‘Don’t be ridiculous ok? See you when you get back.’

             I couldn’t wait to get away from the city – I was keen for a south coast adventure.  I took Hazzy-Bear who was pretty good at travelling for a cat, though he preferred not to. I had to sneak around packing the car when he wasn’t around and never made it obvious I was packing – or I’d end up losing an hour looking for him.

       The owls had forewarned the loss of the trees so I was taking The Gnostic Jung away to read. I was tired. I’d spent most of my life trying to stop bad things from happening; trying to hold the world together with varying degrees of success. It was as if the minute I let my guard down, it was taken apart piece-by-piece by an unseen force that lurked behind every mundane series of events. Exhausting.

           ‘Sometimes you have to let go’, Briony would say, ‘just let go.’

            I was on the beach looking for smooth stones and unusual shells when Briony took a massive overdose and taped a plastic bag over her head. I’d been back for a week, meaning to drop by and say hello. Flashing lights on my bedroom wall woke me from a light sleep. I saw an ambulance, and a few police officers milling around in the garden of Briony’s building from my window. There was no siren. I knew it was her. 

         After she died, strangers cleared her belongings, they took anything worth taking. The rest got thrown in a skip. No one claimed her body for months. I made elaborate plans with pseudo-accomplices to steal her body from the morgue and give her the bush cremation she always wanted. Of course, this was not possible. By the end of summer, the local Baptist church claimed her. 

Summer was hotter that year. The trees had sheltered my house from the midday sun. Their loss had raised the temperature by up to ten degrees. Sun cooked the roof all day, it hammered the east-facing bedroom in the mornings. In the long afternoons, brick walls on all sides absorbed heat causing a heat-bank that radiated outwards at night turning the bedroom into a sauna. I could see straight into Briony’s old bedsit. A couple of junkies moved in. I bought thick block-out curtains from Spotlight.

         I found one of Briony’s small wooden lotus bowls thrown out in the street and took it home. I put a candle in it and left it burning on the day of Briony’s cremation. I came home and found the bowl burned to a perfect ash lotus, which crumbled at my touch. That same night my lover Gabriel had dreamed of a woman wearing a voluminous pale blue gown dotted with tiny silver stars. She was standing in the doorway smiling at us. I knew it was her.

           Briony Reed had been dead for months but her coloured mice were everywhere. She must have opened the cages and set them free. Her pretty mice invaded the neighbourhood, and the cats were having a field day.

…………………………………

The Invisible Intersex

Video we made here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4uuskyqjEQ

“Historically, whenever a culture is on the brink of stepping into a new paradigm, members of that culture react quite predictably. As the old paradigm begins to disintegrate, people attempt to reinvigorate or reinforce the paradigm in order to try and preserve what is known and therefore safe and secure, while resisting the forces of change for fear of facing the unknown” (Noble, 2010)

I set out to examine Intersexuality as one of the invisible battlegrounds for postcolonial assumptions of a sex and gender binary set against the mythical backdrop of Australia’s postcolonial whiteness, our patriarchal culture and an idealised national identity, which continue to infuse the Australian national consciousness (Lopez, 2012).

The construction of sex, race, gender, and the Australian national ideal

The construction of sex and gender is closely related to the construction of race through claims of biological determinants and factors, which also maintain the notion of white racial supremacy (Glenn, 1999). These social constructs are deeply embedded in Australian culture through its historical narratives and maintained through powerful institutional structures, hence it has been difficult to detach from the beliefs that have no basis in reality, yet continue to profoundly inform and shape the social experience (Hall, 1997). Lopez writes that there is a lack of theory on colonial whiteness particularly in the exploration of the relations between whiteness and the continuance of colonial power through institutional discourses.  The patriarchal nature of colonial rule and the rigid binaries set out for both its colonists and the colonised remain embedded in Australian society to this day (Lopez, 2012) and perhaps it is the invisibility of whiteness that ensures it maintains its power and keeps its sexual stereotypes alive.

There is no doubt that intersex births challenge Australia’s normative stereotypes, exposing the remnants of colonial discourses on sex and gender. The most enduring remnant that continues to inform Australia’s historical discourse is that of the mythical heroic bushman as the ‘Aussie’ pioneer and the working class battler (Bellanta, 2012).  This vision of Australian masculinity, which emerged at the end of the colonial era, signaled a shift from the patriarchal sentimentalities of British Imperialism to that of a ‘tough but honest’ national ideal that persists as the national image of Australia. The great Australian stereotype is the all-Australian bloke, who works the land and never complains. Each night, after a drink with his mates he makes his way home to his subservient but loyal wife and adoring family, satisfied with a job well done and ready to work for the good of the nation. We all recognise this image because it is still informing the Australian national imaginary.  The Australian Legend, written by Russell Ward and published in 1958 is the enduring postcolonial interpretation of Australian-ness (Davison, 2012) and it is this idealised notion that battles against the reality of Australia’s true colonial and indigenous histories and also against the non-binary reality of sex and gender. Australia’s colonial past informs the discourses of Australia’s dominant institutions together with the assumption that; sex exists within a natural stable framework in a white heteronormative society. To renounce this belief would destabilize our patriarchal social and political systems. However over the last three decades, Australia’s assertion of white masculinity struggles to retain its cultural supremacy (Bellanta, 2012).

The ‘all-Australian’ imaginary and intersexuality

The Australian contemporary understanding of intersexuality is deeply flawed as is the notion of what it means to be Australian; limited by the normative experience of a white male/female gender binary, which forms the central framework and context for both a personal sense of self and the construction of an Australian national identity (Murrie, 1998).  One of the legacies of colonialism is that this established power dynamic continues to undermine anyone who does not fit the ‘Aussie’ masculine/feminine ideal. This has effectively erased the voice of the intersex community, which is heavily marginalised through its biological ambiguities and routinely defined through medical discourse (Bing, Bergvall & Freed 2013, p.8).  Discussion of Intersexuality is a social taboo; it has been kept hidden and has no place in the national imaginary.  If we add being indigenous to this equation, then we have a multi-marginalised experience as constructions of sex, gender and race come into play (Glenn, 1999). Aboriginal friends who identify as gay or transgender have expressed to me that in their early years of coming out, they were rejected by both the indigenous and non-indigenous communities and perceived themselves to be on the lowest rung of a heavily stratified society and this is confirmed many times over by indigenous members of the LGBTI community (Sisters & Brothers NT, 2016). Without minimising the experience of other sex and gender variant individuals, I discovered during my research that the intersex individual has been hidden deep within our social, sexual and racial hierarchies; invalidated, surgically or hormonally assimilated into the dominant binary order and then more recently, burdened with the responsibility of leading society out of its hetero-normative limitations (Holmes, 2008, p.16).

Defining Intersex: alternative genders and the missing Intersex

It is important to concomitantly clarify and reclaim the term ‘intersex’ as distinct from the more generalised understanding of terminologies associated with alternative genders, particularly if sociological research is to be effective for addressing intersex marginalisation.   Intersexual persons are routinely mistaken for transgender. Put simply, the difference between intersex and transgender is that transgender has to do with ones gender identity and intersex is about ones biological characteristics. The term intersex applies to a chromosomal, biological phenomenon and Intersex births are not as uncommon as most people think. One in two thousand births are considered intersex, however 1 in 400 births show some kind of hormonal and sexual anomaly that does not fit neatly into the ideal male/female binary.  One in 4,500 are born with both male and female genitalia (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Sexual dimorphism has been to date a dominant area of research in studies on sex and gender with definitions of sex variant and non-binary genders including persons born carrying a combination of XX and XY chromosomes (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). The number of intersex people worldwide is estimated to be 1.7% and may be as high as 4% of the world’s population if we include people born with “unacceptable genitalia” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Clearly there is a human sex spectrum that has always naturally occurred. This is not some recent mutation or abnormality; nor is it rare, therefore it is important to examine why we still find it difficult to distinguish intersex from transgender as they have always been a part of human biological history. On deeper investigation, they have not been included as part of Australian social or cultural histories, which have been constructed around colonial and postcolonial perspectives and I sought to investigate whether there was a time when the intersex individual was recognised or socially accepted, relative to Australia’s colonial past.

Intersex in the pre-colonial era

I was surprised to find that “17^th century England recognised two genders but three biological sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite” (Moore, 1998). Intersex persons were socially acknowledged and accepted, provided they chose one of the binary-gender identities and either married an opposite gender or entered the church for a lifetime of monastic service. This was in adherence to church law and the religious belief that sexual relations were for procreation between a man and a woman. Also interesting to note is that attraction to the same sex, although considered a transgression was tolerated as long as the status quo was maintained and people continued to be married as man and wife. It was between 1690 and 1710 that this attitude radically changed. It appears that during the pre-colonial Enlightenment era the secularists sought to delegitimise religious authority. As we entered the colonial era, the move toward individual autonomy developed and these changes became the “ideal prerequisites for modern masculinity” (Moore 1998, p.4). Consequently, what we term as the ‘alpha male’ was coming into his dominion. Through colonialism with its white racial ideal and masculinity, it became the central figure for Australian national pride.

The normalising society

While Australian society has in recent times become more accepting of trans/sexuality our medical institutions continue to define those born with both male and female chromosomes; and more specifically those born with ambiguous genitalia, pathologically (Fausto-Sterling, 2000) and perhaps this is because they represent a scientific challenge to the status quo.  Intersex infants are routinely assigned a gender at birth, with many subjected to surgical intervention from infancy and nearly all receiving hormonal intervention as pre-pubescent children despite irrefutable scientific evidence that a male/female sex-binary does not exist in nature (Ainsworth, 2005). Biomedicine has come to recognise intersexuality as a naturally occurring anatomical and sexual variant but defines it as pathology rather than a natural difference (Holmes, 2008, p.20). Hence the intersex body from birth is subject to the laws of a particular mode of living, centred on the acceptable appearance of human genitalia in order to conform to social expectations and be suitable for life in a binary system (Guidotto, 2007). The histories of sexualised bodies and sexualities are formed within a political and cultural framework that continues to deny the instability of sex.  Our biomedical institutions act as agents for a heteronormative society and legitimise the assumption of a stable sex binary, by altering the bodies of healthy intersex infants. This invasive, violent body shaming has emerged as a serious human rights issue (Wilson, 2012). It is hard to accept that we live in a society that gives up its intersex infants as the subjects of a personified medical discourse on sex and gender (Holmes, 2008) to satisfy the systemic belief in a sexual binary.  

Why intersex? : Postcolonial bio-politics in Australia

As Intersex persons have existed throughout human history and are about as rare as redheads (Barnes, 2013) I was motivated to explore why healthy Intersex births continue to be defined as a chromosomal disorder, an abnormality or a medical problem and I determined that colonial constructions of sex and gender are deeply embedded in contemporary discourses, which have controlled the topic of intersex through largely medicalised terms. Foucault found that power operates within the institutional apparatus and uses knowledge to regulate the conduct of others (Hall, 2001). The relation between sex, race and gender as historical, social and cultural constructs began to make some sense to me at this point (Stoler, 1995). The dominant system has rules and these rules regulate behaviour and physical appearance until they are in line with its social norms:

“ It is taken for granted that sexual and racial difference are inherent qualities of the corporeal, and, moreover, that male and female bodies, black and white bodies, may each respectively fit a universal category” (Price & Shildrick, 1999).

There is little sociological research that deals specifically with intersex invisibility, or the deeper systemic implications of the taboo nature of their existence. They have almost no protections under Australian law as intersex people; in fact a paper that consolidated federal anti-discrimination laws was 60 pages long yet the word ‘Intersex’ was not mentioned (Wilson, 2012). It is curious that this would occur despite extensive feminist scholarship on the construction of sex and gender and a substantial history of medical research on hermaphroditism.  Gender seems more deeply engrained than race in biology; through reproduction, sexuality and the body itself. Women of colour for example have historically born the bulk of the burden as household laborers for the middle-classes in colonial and postcolonial societies with the added emotional responsibility of rearing white middle class children hence freeing middle class white women to pursue cultural activities and later take up careers, which ironically facilitated the feminist movement (Glenn, 1999) and initiated debates on human rights and equality.   While Australian political discourses about equality and human rights are convincing, they have their limitations and partialities.

Our human rights discourse once excluded anyone who fell outside of the white, middle class, male classification and emphasised particular values and meanings as comprehensive and unanimous.  These values, which are a legacy of Australia’s colonial past, remain engrained in our culture and within our language (Weedon, 2002) and continue to support Australia’s social hierarchies. The Patriarchal construction of gender is not based on natural difference but on the inherent view of women as the frailer sex, which is conversely in possession of an unknown and threatening source of power. Most alternative genders still function within this binary framework and do not challenge it, however I believe the intersex individual has been isolated for special treatment precisely because they do.   The intersex individual’s biology contradicts the patriarchal domestic order; based on the mistaken assumption of a natural sex binary, yet today this assumption cannot be supported by scientific evidence (Moore, 1998 p.6).

We can easily imagine the social, political and legal upheavals, which intersexuality poses for Australia’s patriarchal systems, particularly for the assigned roles within our society and for the actual language we use since they challenge the established order of ‘man or woman’, ‘black or white’ and ‘heterosexual or homosexual’ by occupying a space in between and standing as physical evidence for what modern biology has confirmed – that the binary is not natural but a social construct that serves to support a patriarchy and its colonial legacies (Moore, 1998). It is therefore a bio-political assault that otherwise healthy intersex persons are medically defined at birth and treated to conform to a binary system. Our medical institutions are enduring symbols of patriarchal authority and power and as such they practice bio-politics on the population. Medical discourse and its discursive subcategories demand submission to biomedical surveillance, authority, diagnosis and treatment (Turner, 2007). The regulating power of medical discourse is particularly relevant for parents who give birth to an intersex child with ambiguous genitalia, which is seldom anticipated (Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012). Many parents submit to medical authority, which intervenes quickly to change the intersex infant’s body (Chase, 1998).    

The postcolonial gender imaginary: binary personal pronouns

By the end of the 20^th century, postcolonial theories of sex and gender were being questioned. Exploration into previously unchallenged social, moral and biological assumptions prompted new discussion about the influences that have shaped mainstream views on gender and sexuality (Noble, 2010) particularly as British colonial literature and scholarship had featured sexual domination as symbolic of European supremacy (Stoler, 1989). The structure of the English language was therefore key to colonial power and control, and continues to support the assumptions of a sex binary and anyone who does not outwardly conform to the accepted gender stereotypes are marginalized or excluded.  It has been suggested that the binary pronouns of he, she, his and her, forcibly impose the normative binary system in support of the assumption that non-binary genders must fit into either the male or female gender category and this is profoundly relevant to the intersex individual (Wayne, 2005).   As far as the English language is concerned there are two sexes, two genders and two sexual orientations. Modern attempts to address the missing reference to a non-binary sex and/or gender are admirable and may take hold in the future, (Corwin, 2009) however what is interesting is that a pronoun for the third gender has never existed in the English language besides the derogatory ‘it’ even though intersex individuals have been a part of humankind since the dawn of time. Consequently the intersex individual is easily overlooked and excluded from the national histories of Australia and the cultural adherence to a gender binary, which is embedded in our social and political discourses and supports the continuance of the colonial puritanical imperative on the intersex body (Hester, 2004).

Supposition

Australia’s national narratives are bound to both a white racial ideal and a patriarchal sex binary that do not exist. The struggle for liberation becomes the location for an ideological battle yet it is also the point of departure; where we can cast off the unnatural assumptions and beliefs that dominate Australian culture.

References

Ainsworth, C. 2015, ‘Sex redefined’, Nature: International weekly journal of science, vol. 518, no. 7539, a href=”http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943&gt”>http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943%3E”>http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943>;

Barnes, H. 2013, ‘How many redheads are there in the world?’ Magazine , BBC News, viewed October 23 2016, a href=”http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24331615&gt”>http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24331615″>http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24331615>

Bellanta, M.J., 2012,  ‘Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.43, no.3, pp.412-428.

Bing M., Bergvall V.L. & Freed A. F., 2013, 1996, Rethinking language and gender research: theory and practice, Routledge, London & New York.

Chase, C. 1998,  ‘Hermaphrodites With Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of Intersex Political Activism’,  GLQ: A Journal of lesbian & Gay Studies,  vol.4,  no.2,  pp.181-211, Duke University Press.

Corwin, A.I., 2009, ‘Language and gender variance: Constructing gender beyond the male/female binary’. Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, vol.12 no.4.

Davison, G., 2012,  ‘Rethinking the Australian legend’,  Australian Historical Studies, vol.43 no.3, pp.429-451.

Fausto-Sterling, A., 2000, ‘The Five Sexes Revisited’ Sciences, vol. 40, no. 4, p. 18.

Glenn, E.N., 1999, ‘The social construction and institutionalization of gender and race’, Revisioning gender, pp.3-43.

Guidotto, N., 2007, ‘Monsters in the Closet: Biopolitics and Intersexuality’, Wagadu, Intersecting Gender and Disability Perspectives in Rethinking Postcolonial Identities, vol. 4.

Hall, S. 1997, ‘Foucault: Power, Knowledge and Discourse’, in S. Hall (ed), Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. The work of representation,  London, Sage.

Heggie, V. 2015, ‘Nature and sex redefined – we have never been binary’, The Guardian, viewed 20 October 2016  a href=”https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2015/feb/19/nature-s…&gt”>https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2015/feb/19/nature-sex-redefined-we-have-never-been-binary”>https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-h-word/2015/feb/19/nature-s…>

Hester, D.  2004,  ‘Intersexes and the end of gender: Corporeal ethics and postgender bodies’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol.13 no.3, pp.215-225,

Holmes, M., 2008, Intersex: A perilous difference. Associated University Press.

Lopez, A.J., 2012, Postcolonial whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire. SUNY Press.

Moore, C. 1998, Colonial manhood and masculinities, Journal of Australian studies, vol.22 no.56 pp.1-35

Murrie, L., 1998, ‘Changing masculinities: disruption and anxiety in contemporary Australian writing’. Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22 no.56 , pp.169-179.

Nobel, M.  2010,  ‘Representations of Klinefelter Syndrome’, OII Australia – Intersex Australia, viewed October 2016, a href=”https://oii.org.au/18161/representations-klinefelter-syndrome/&gt”>https://oii.org.au/18161/representations-klinefelter-syndrome/%3E”>https://oii.org.au/18161/representations-klinefelter-syndrome/>;

Organisation Intersex International Australia, 2012, Intersex for Allies, ‘who are Intersex people?’ viewed 20 October 2016,   a href=”https://oii.org.au/allies/&gt”>https://oii.org.au/allies/”>https://oii.org.au/allies/>

Price, J., & Shildrick, M., 1999, ‘Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction’, in J. Price,

& M. Shildrick (Eds.), Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, pp. 1-15,

Routledge, New York.

Sisters & Brothers NT, 2016, viewed 20 October 2016, a href=”http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/goals/&gt”>http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/goals/”>http://sistersandbrothersnt.com/goals/>

Stoler, A. L. 1989, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist, vol.16, no. 4, pp. 634-60.

Stoler, A. L. 1995, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press., pp. 19-54 

Turner, B.S., 2007,  Medical Power and Social Knowledge, Sage, London.

Valentine, D. and Wilchins, R.A., 1997. ‘One percent on the burn chart: gender, genitals, and hermaphrodites with attitude’. Social Text, vol.52, no.53, pp.215-222.

Wayne, L.D., 2005, ‘Neutral pronouns: A modest proposal whose time has come’. Canadian Woman Studies, vol.24, no.2.

Weedon C. 2002, ‘Key Issues in Postcolonial Feminism: A Western Perspective’. Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, vol.1, p.2 , viewed  20 October 2016, a href=”http://www.genderforum.org/issues/genderealisations/key-issues-in-p&#8230″>http://www.genderforum.org/issues/genderealisations/key-issues-in-postcolonial-feminism-a-western-perspective/%3E”>http://www.genderforum.org/issues/genderealisations/key-issues-in-p…;

Wilson, G. 2013, Equal Rights for Intersex People: Testimony of an Intersex Person The Equal Rights Review, Vol. 10, viewed 20 October 2016, a href=”http://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/ERR10_testimony.pdf&#8230″>http://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/ERR10_testimony.pdf%3E”>http://www.equalrightstrust.org/ertdocumentbank/ERR10_testimony.pdf…;

Wilson, G. 2012, ‘Making the Invisible Visible: Intersex Rights are human rights which should be protected under new equality laws’, Equality Law Reform Project, viewed 20 October 2016,  a href=”http://www.equalitylaw.org.au/elrp-guest-blogs/making-the-invisible&#8230″>http://www.equalitylaw.org.au/elrp-guest-blogs/making-the-invisible-visible-intersex-rights-are-human-rights-which-should-be-protected-under-new-eq%3E”>http://www.equalitylaw.org.au/elrp-guest-blogs/making-the-invisible…;Benightment,