Invitation image to The Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland by Wanda Gillespie

Edgar Allen Poe’s novel ‘The Narrative Of Gordon Pym’ (1838) evokes the belief, prior to the exploration of Antarctica, that a lost civilisation may be contained within its icy borders. Rather than the black-skinned inhabitants of deepest darkest Africa, this furthest reach of the world would reveal a race of Hyperboreans, with a culture that was foreign but comparable to the civilised West.

Poe’s tale concludes when the hero manages to escape the violence of dark-skinned natives by fleeing further south, until the waters mysteriously grew warmer…

The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us.  Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but upon touching him we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

Rather than representing the end of the world, the icy wastes of Antarctica would turn out to be a means of keeping this other civilisation isolated from the rest of the globe.

Installation shot of The Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland

Today, the artist Wanda Gillespie has revived this myth in an installation at Craft Victoria titled The Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland. The story behind this work is of the discovery of wooden artefacts in Queen Maud Land, Antarctica, as a result of global warming. It is suggested that these objects are from the same period as the ancient civilisations of Sumeria and Egypt. As the artist statement claims, ‘The meticulously crafted objects recovered from three initial archaeological missions suggest the culture may have been a precursor to such modern-day indigenous cultures of the South Pacific as Maori, Aboriginal Australian, Polynesian and East Indonesian.’

While the faces depicted are undeniably of European origin, the hair styles and demeanour suggest a Pacific culture, such as Maori. Gillespie surmises that these objects refer to a ceremony that attempt to ensure the safe passage of a spirit into the afterlife.

It’s a curious racial fantasy that white people preceded other indigenous groups to the South. It does have precedents, such as the notion that the Lost Tribe of Israel fled south thousands of years ago (shared broadly from Cecil Rhodes to Mormons). While the earlier fantasies had clear a imperial agenda, what does it mean to invent one today?

In Australia, the idea of one’s special relation to landscape has been largely given over to its Indigenous peoples, who are granted a privileged, if symbolic, relation to ‘country’. This is relatively easy arrangement for settler Australians as most live in cities, where there is little engagement with land, beyond real estate prices. But it would be argued that this does leave settler Australians with a undeveloped sense of place. Fair enough to give over country to traditional owners, but then what are you still doing here?

Detail of The Antarctic Kingdom of Gondwanaland

Antarctica seems immune to such issues, as it has no indigenous people. It thus provides a blank screen on which to project speculations about place and culture. One of the notable elements of Gillespie’s Hyperborean world is the prevalence of the banksia. This figures strongly in the early colonial imagination, which populated the bush with mysterious figures such as bunyips. So by this detour south, Gillespie seems to return to where she come from. She manages to imbue an otherwise sterile, commodified and urban world with the enchantment that once belonged to traditional societies, who had an active engagement in rites of passage, and believed there was something more than the sum total of individual interests.

As the world continues to warm, it will be interesting to see what more is revealed of this mysterious south.

Wanda Gillespie acknowledges Rodney Glick and Indonesian carver Made Leno (who produced the heads), writer Varia Karipoff and Alastair Boell from the Melbourne Guild of Fine Woodworking. Her website is http://www.wandagillespie.com/

Yantras are square charms whose power is based on words and diagrams. The above yantra was obtained from a market in Ahmedabad, India and contains the principles of India geomancy on which much architecture is based. Vastu Shastra gives particular meaning to the cardinal points. In the Vastu Purusha Mandala, the earth is represented by a square. In this case, the direction on top is east. The morning sun is considered especially powerful. While North is ruled by Kubera, the god of wealth, South is governed by Yama, or death.

It is tempting to position the South as a victim of the North. Certainly, the conflict between the French North and South appears to be a story of ruthless oppressor that violently subjugates a peace-loving and tolerant victim. Is that necessarily so? Whichever way, French history straddles a cultural fault-line that continues to move in opposing directions.

France contains at least two nations. While the north was populated by Franks from Germany, the south was a separate entity ruled by Visigoths in the Middle Ages. They were more closely connected laterally with the Catalans than vertically with the Franks. During its independent history, the South, known as Occitania, was a site of resistance to imperial rule.

Their first form of Christianity was Arianism, which taught that God came before Jesus. Around the tenth century, an interest in ‘courtly love’ emerged under the influence of poetry from Andalusia. The word “troubadour” was derived from an Arabic root ta-ra-ba meaning “to be transported with joy and delight”. The literary genre of ‘chanson de geste’ emerged celebrating refinement of taste in contract to the tales of war and heroic deeds prevalent in the north.

Cathars expelled from Carcassonne in 1209

At the same time, the religion of the Cathars developed, which denigrated earthly life and adopted values of simplicity and abstinence. In 1208, a Papal legate was assassinated in Saint-Gilles which prompted the Franks in support of Rome to cleanse the South of heresy. The Albigensian crusade led by Simon de Monfort became legendary for its brutality. In 1209 the town of Beziers was sacked and none of the population was spared, even those who sought refuge in the church. When the commander was asked by a Crusader how to tell Catholics from Cathars once they had taken the city, the abbot supposedly replied, Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet, “Kill them all, God will know His own.”  The second crusade against the South involved the siege of Montségur (Montsalvat) during which the inquisition was first established.

The successful completion of the crusade led to the Frankish domination of the South and the status of France as a unified country. Nonetheless, the South continued to be a source of suspicion, characterised as stubborn and greedy. During the reformation, it contained Protestant strongholds. As administration became more centralised around Paris, French was enforced as the language of administrations.

Frédéric Mistral

From the Revolution, the South was identified as a source of political change. Some autonomy was restored to the Midi, as it was now called. In the nineteenth century, writers such as Augustin Thierry and Michelet celebrated the South as a source of democracy. In 1854 Frédéric Mistral founded the Félibrige, dedicated to supporting Occitan literature, which gradually shifted to support for the Catholic Right. Inspired by his Nobel Prize in 1904, the Chilean poet Lucila Godoy Alcayaga changed her name to Gabriela Mistral. The mystical legend of Cathars was established by Napoléon Peyrat with the 1871 publication Histoire des Albigeois. But at the same time, there was pressure to standardise French under la Vergonha (the shaming), which prohibited the teaching of Occitan in schools. In reaction, the youth movement

Hartèra emerged to promote Occitan, as one of its posters says:

To hell with the shame…
Our patois is a language: Occitan;
Our South is a country: Occitania;

Our folklore is a culture.
We want respect for our difference.
Share, mix, walk!!

During the 1930s, there were attempts to identify the Cathars as ancestors of the Nazis, particularly through the romantic myth of Montsalvat. However, during Second World War, the area of France not occupied by Germans corresponded to that of Occitania. In 1940, editors of Cahiers du Sud, including Simone Weil and Louis Aragon called a gathering in Marseille to found a community of tolerance. As Weil said at the time, ‘Catharism was the last living expression in Europe of pre-Roman antiquity. It is from this thinking that Christianity descends; but the Gnostics, Manicheans and Cathars seem to be the only ones that remained faithful to it.’ After the war, the South became a site of creative experiment. In 1946, the Dada poet Tristan Tzara founded the Institut d’Etudes Occitanes in Toulouse.

Popular interest developed in 1960 with a two-part television series Les Cathares, drawing on Peyrat’s romantic history. The South became an issue in the revolutionary movement of May 1968

Now the South has become a significant luxury brand, associated with the region of Provencal in cuisine and home goods. Olivier Baussan founded the company l’Occitane, ‘L’OCCITANE has drawn inspiration from Mediterranean art de vivre and traditional Provencal techniques to create natural beauty products devoted to well-being and the pleasure of delighting and caring for oneself.’ This company has now extended its southern taste to other countries. The brand L’Occitane do Brasil expresses the authenticity of a first natural sun care line made exclusively in Brazil.

Part of the mythology of L’Occitane revolves around the ‘everlasting’ flower immortelle, the source of eternal youth.

Meanwhile, the flower has become a rallying point for revival of Occitan culture. In 1978, the band Nadau composed the song L’immortèla (The Edelweiss) which tells of the flower of love and the mountain journeys of the southern people,

Up we’ll walk, Little Peter, to the edelweiss
Up we’ll walk, Little Peter, until we find that place!

Occitania follows a familiar path in Europe, where civilisations known for their tolerance and poetry fall victim to the northern military regimes. This internal colonisation then provides the rehearsal for the subjugation of peoples beyond. Once the target of heresy has shifted to the colonies, then the internal other becomes a subject of nostalgia and commodification.

Rather than a single identity, countries like France seem constituted by a dialogue between opposing halves. While the heretic South helps to sharpen the values of the North, the brutality of the North conjures the idea of a sensual and tolerant South.

One way of reading an antipodean country like Australia is through the lens of its symmetrical opposites. For many, Australia has been compared to Nordic countries. One of Australia’s leading Nordicists, John Stanley Martin, unfortunately passed away this week. Here he talking about the commonality between Australia and Iceland.

John Stanley Martin, descendent of the Eureka rebels, went to Iceland to pursue a degree in Old Norse. He recalls a conversation with Icelandic novelist Sigurdur Nordal, who saw both nations as sharing the challenge of new beginnings:

As an Australian you understand Iceland better than the Europeans do, because we are Europe’s first colony. We are the first time they came. Every time there was a movement in Europe, there was always a group before—the Celts moving in, the Germanics moving in—and there would be an amalgam of the cultures… In Norway, from where they came, it was limited resources, someone gets more and someone gets less. Come to Iceland and it’s a free for all, grabbing land, so you don’t respect the environment in the same way any more.[i]

[i] John Stanley Martin, interview, 16 February 2001.

Virgin Airlines have just released their first direct flight between Sydney and Johannesburg. To  tempt Aussie travellers to experience the wonders of Africa, they released a brief clip.

The clip starts in a sedate fashion, with images of relaxing familiar scenes involving swimming pools and safaris, but then it builds up pace to a vertiginous series of scenes mostly involving positions of great altitude:

• View from Table Mountain looking down on Cape Town
• Epic dam
• Majestic waterfalls
• Abseiling down Table Mountain
• Flying in a helicopter
• Teeing off from a precipice
• Motorbike jumping
• Flock of birds flying
• Bridge bungee-jumping

Naturally, this is an airline company, so they are keen to promote the experience of flight. But the resulting engagement with Africa is puzzling. Would you fly to Africa in order to hit a golf ball into the seeming void? Surely, this is simply the expression of a deeply embedded colonial mentality that sees Africa as a vast playing field for Western adventure.

Sustaining this mentality is lofty point of view by which we gaze down on Africa. While they settle on a horizontal plane of nature, we move along the vertical axis of experience.

Today, few of us would admit to any racist attitudes towards those in Africa. Wearing Make Poverty History bracelets, we see ourselves as far from the brutality of those who scrambled for Africa in the nineteenth century. Yet, the Virgin ad shows us that the imaginary architecture of colonialism remains deeply embedded.

Come on down.

“Whatever has black sounds has duende.”
Garcia Lorca

Spain seems an exception to civilised Europe. While the Enlightenment promoted the pursuit of reason based on natural order, Spain remained captive to a theatre of violence as it persecuted heretics and bulls. Is this a true image of Spain?

What has been termed the ‘Black Legend’ of Spain emerged during the Reformation, where the Inquisition was depicted by Protestants and Anglo-Saxons as a sign of inherent Spanish cruelty.

The negative view of the Spanish was further elaborated by the French. To their neighbours across the Pyrenees, the Spanish were a barbarous people, tainted by their African influence. They were variously described at Turkish or Arab Christians—anything but European. According to Stendhal, ‘Blood, manners, language, way of living and fighting, everything in Spain is African. If the Spaniard were a Muslim he would be a complete African’.

From 1795, Spain was occupied by Napoleonic France for nearly ten years. After expelling the French, the restored King Ferdinand VII initiated a reaction against liberalism. The resulting French disdain for the Spanish cast an orientalist shadow, popularised in the literary genre of travel writing known as the Espagnolade. The Spanish themselves conspired to construct a romantic image of themselves: the middle class reacted against the Bourbon invaders by inventing a defiant national culture drawn from the Madrid working class, including bull-fighting and flamenco.

The rest of Europe used Spain as a stage for the grand passions. The Spanish south, in particular Seville, became the setting for the passions of European opera, such as Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni, and Il Travatore. This culminated in Bizet’s Carmen, which orchestrated and choreographed the wild Andalusian spirit. Spanish orientalism continues today in the world music scene, as flamenco is celebrated in the cinema of Carlos Saura and Tony Gatlief.

As with Italy, Spanish culture internalises this division within its own territory. For nearly 800 years, from the early eighth century, the south of Spanish was an Islamic civilisation. In 1492, on the same year that Christopher Columbus set out to find the New World, the new Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella forced the surrender of Granada, the last Muslim city, and expelled the Jewish population from the entire peninsular.

After the Reconquista, those of Moorish background were always under suspicion. The original terms of surrender guaranteed that Moors would keep their goods and continue to observe Sharia. But forced conversions soon followed. Even those who converted became victim of new laws, such as the limpieza de sangre (purity of blood). Granada soon lost its once thriving silk industry and was eventually eclipsed by Seville, which became the gateway to the new world.

After having brutally expelled the heretics, signs of regret began to appear. This ambivalence is particularly strong in the classic novel of Spanish literature, Don Quixote. The story of the knight-errant and his squire takes the form of a journey south, from Castile and towards Seville. In the course of his adventures, Quixote feels free to identify any untrustworthy character as an Andalusian moor. However, in attempting to revive the earlier romances of Spanish classical literature, Cervantes finds parallel in the opposition between brutal Visigoths and noble Basques and the harsh treatment which the Spanish handed out to the Moors. Don Quixote in the end sides with a Moorish lover (Abindarráez), against his Christian rival. Most remarkably, the book itself is revealed to be written by a Moor, Cide Hamete Benengeli and includes a long passage identifying all the Spanish words that come from Arabic language, such as almorzar, to have lunch.

At the end of Don Quixote, a lead box is found that contains laudatory poems. This alludes to the lead books that were supposedly discovered in Granada in early sixteenth century. Known as the plomos, they contained manuscripts in Arabic, supposedly signed by St. Cecilio, which implied that Granada was at the heart of the mystery of Immaculate Conception. They were in fact forgeries attempting to show that the Moriscos were actually early Christians, thus deserving respect.

The north-south fault line re-emerged in the twentieth century with the Spanish Civil War. The Republican forces were focused in the south-east of the country, supported particularly by Catalan radicals. Soon after the war began, the Republican poet Garcia Lorca was murdered by fascist forces. Lorca had championed the South as the spiritual home of ‘duende’, the dark passion that informs great art, embodied in the cante jondo (deep song) of Flamenco singing.

The continuing feeling for the South as a region of the vanquished past is evoked in Victor Erice’s film, El Sur, which conflates the rift between families caused by the civil war and a story of love  lost in the division between south and north. One of the films touching scenes is during the daughter’s first communion when she dances with her father, joining together the southern past with the northern present.

Given more recent tensions in the Middle East, this south of Spain has become particularly interesting as a region where the three religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity were seen to co-exist relatively peacefully and productively. The Convencia was known particularly for its philosophy: scholars such as Averroes developed the Greek classical tradition of Aristotle into systems of thought that would lay the ground for Scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas.

What joined these philosophers was a sense of the limits of knowledge. Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed developed an apophatic theology which argued that divinity could never be understood within human terms, only negatively. In the early 12^th century, Ibn Tufail wrote a philosophical novel, which was eventually translated into English as Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan. This tale of a man who grows up isolated from all civilisation inspired the first novel in English, Robinson Crusoe. Tufail encouraged Averroes (Ibn Rushd) to write his commentaries on Aristotle, which developed the belief that ‘existence precedes essence’. Such views had a strong influence on the Enlightenment and secular views that emerged much later in eighteenth century Europe.

It was through the Convivencia that the West ‘discovered’ Arabic numerals, paper, rice, sugar, cotton and the tradition of courtly love poems, including troubadours. From this perspective, the Reconquista seems like an act of grand theft, in which the benefits of civilisation were stolen and all traces of their previous ownership removed. But that would be to forget the curiosity about this abandoned past that continued to shadow the glories of the Spanish nation. Recent gestures like Erice’s El Sur attempt to rediscover how those pieces might fit together.

The possibility of reconciliation continues to haunt contemporary Spain. It’s part of a larger story about the two Europes – the modern North and backward South. The price of victory in the North came at the cost of the heartfelt traditions it seems to yearn for in its lost South. Whether or not reconciliation is possible, this dialogue continues to define the identity of Europe.

References

José Colmeiro ‘Exorcising exoticism: Carmen and the construction of oriental Spain’ Comparative Literature (2002) 54: 2, pp. 127-144

Judith Etzion ‘Spanish Music as Perceived in Western Music Historiography: A Case of the Black Legend?’ International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (1998) 29: 2, pp. 93-120

Nicholás Wey Gómez The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2008

Eric Clifford Graf Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007

A. Katie Harris From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing A City’s Past In Early Modern Spain Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007

Michael Richards A Time Of Silence: Civil War And The Culture Of Repression In Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945 : Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 67-69

This story is being taken up by Kim Peart. Here is Kim’s response to south in a Tasmanian context:

When I consider "south" and as one who grew up in southern Tasmania in the path of the roaring forties, I think of the winds that blow around Antarctica in a continual gale that drives the ocean waves and currents in a rhythm and a hum of bounding breakers that now grow ever stronger with global warming in a giant vortex of ever marching waves that rise up like mountains to swallow anything that dares swim too low into their gaping chasm or send them flying off into the upper atmosphere should the howling winds take hold and swirl them from the frothing foam at their peak to sail upon the gathered smoke of the Victorian bushfires, made fiercer like an atomic furnace in a slowly heating world, now floating high above the great frozen sea of ice that is south.

• Peart’s article in the Tasmanian Times.
• The exhibition Haven where Jorgenson’s life was turned to art

High on the hill, there lived the refined nobles, who cultivated highly sophisticated sciences and arts. With great care and kindness they managed the affairs of the realm, particularly those they fondly called their ‘children’, the peasants living below in the valley.

For many years the kingdom was happy and prosperous, but then a visitor came from a far away land. He was a travelling minstrel who liked to stir trouble. When he heard the peasants referred to as children he sung, ‘But don’t you find that a bitter pill? Are you not adults just the same those on the hill?’ The minstrel sowed dissent in the peaceful kingdom. Soon other minstrels emerged from within the kingdom with songs like ‘No kidding’, ‘Not younger anymore’.

They started to ask questions: What shall we call ourselves that has more dignity than ‘children’? Eventually they determined that they simply wanted to be known as the ‘people of the valley’. They sent a deputation up the hill and demanded recognition of their new status.

To their surprise, they found that the nobles above were most understanding of their concerns and even begged forgiveness for their insensitivity. But more than that, they even proposed to establish a Centre for the Study of Valley People.

The peasants returned home vindicated. They felt proud that they were no longer children to be looked down on, but ‘people of the valley’ with their own distinct experiences and values.

But in the valley, there was particular group of people who were confused by the new arrangement. Down in the valley lived a small community of nobles, descended from those on the hill, whose function was to manage customs on the river port. They were accustomed to their privileged status as ‘adults’ living down among the ‘children’. But now they witnessed what were previously known as ‘children’ proudly identifying themselves as ‘people of the valley’. And these mere children seemed to win the approval of those from above.

So the river nobles decided they needed to change their story. They began to describe themselves as ‘people of the valley’ too. But not everyone was convinced of this, particularly from outside. Their peasant neighbours still saw them as patronising hill people, not genuine valley people like themselves. And their noble ancestors above viewed them as remnants of a older less enlightened time.

Looked down above, excluded from below, the valley nobles felt lost and abandoned. They held a meeting to discuss their plight. Amid the despair and confusion, a voice rose above the crowd. It was Tandurrum, an elder of the native river people wrapped in a traditional fur cloak. She generously offered to assist the river nobles: ‘As an original inhabitant of the valley, let me help you to change your ways so that you will feel more at home in the valley. Let me help you change from ladies and gentlemen to sisters and brothers…’ As she continued to explain how the river nobles could become people of the valley, their mood lifted and they could see a way forward.

So, would the river nobles take the advice of the original inhabitants, forsaking their historic privileges? Or would they continue to uphold the ideals of the hill, and become the overlooked in the Kingdom of Bellavista?

To be continued…

The South African design expo Design Indaba makes the claim that global ascendency has passed to the other half of the world:

Stand back Milan, London and New York, here comes SOUTH! SOUTH is an inversion of hand-me-down Eurocentric creativity, a world map turned upside down conceptually, so that South Africa is on top. Over the past few years Design Indaba has witnessed the organic emergence of a new creative ethos. With South Africa’s diverse, rich heritage as source material, and inspired by the rebirth of the South African nation, definitions that move beyond ethnicity, religion, race or language have emerged.

This marketing campaign is useful for raising some important questions about the idea of South:

• If North and South are competitors, what is the game in which they are participating?
• Is there a way that South can provide not only a new slumdog competitor in the global fame game, can it also help craft some new rules?
• What rules might these be?
• Why shouldn’t a poor country like South Africa have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of global glory?
• If South Africa benefits from this inversion of value, what about other countries who share this part of the world, like Madagascar, Australia, Fiji and Argentina?

This paper was presented at the International Conference on Hegemony, Counter Hegemony and Alternatives to Hegemony: Implications for the South in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, February 2009

My starting point for this paper on hegemony is somewhere below the level of formal political relations. I address certain cognitive elements that we employ when we attempt to orient ourselves in the world. But this is not to avoid the political. Rather, I attempt to explore the extent to which hegemonic structures reach into our personal consciousness. I argue that the south-south axis requires not just a political re-alignment, but also a radical re-visioning of our everyday world.

To locate this everyday world, it is useful if we gather together at the same location. For a location, I am using this image of a country landscape that I obtained from Flickr. It’s a typical pastoral scene of a rural field with the sun setting over a mountain in the distance. To locate ourselves in the phenomenological dimension, let’s consider the very basic scenario. You’re touring around the area and decide to stop the car and take a stroll to get some exercise. You know there are no laws about trespassing here so you are free to travel where you wish. So where would you go?

Most people when asked this question will elect to walk up the hill on the horizon, towards the setting sun. Not everyone chooses the same direction, but this seems the default option. The actual direction itself is not critical to my argument. But by considering some of the dimensions at play in the decision to take the default direction we can begin to think about how the world might be skewed towards dominant powers at an everyday cognitive level.

So, where are we going when we move towards the hill? In the first instance, we are moving towards the light. The illuminated world provides us with a space of knowledge and action, as opposed to the darkness looming behind us. In following the sun we travel west, toward the future, leaving the past behind.

As well as moving towards the horizon, we are also fixing our journey on a hill that stands out from the plains. We are choosing a singular element that acts as a figure on the ground of the landscape.

And, finally, we are more than just focusing on a unique destination; we are also elevating ourselves above the general scene. From this point, we can then see not only the field that we have emerged from, but the distant horizon beyond, on which another hill sits.[1] But there’s more than simple information gain in reaching the summit. There’s also a sense of power in being able to survey the world around us. So we used to say as children whenever we found a vantage point above our playmates – ‘I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal.’ The choreography of power seems essentially vertical.

Looking up to power

Thank you for lingering at this scene. My challenge now is to reward your patience by taking us back to the matter of common concern—the global hegemony in which the interests of capital in the North dominate the lives of the poor in the South.

Let’s step back and consider our terms. The word ‘hegemony’ is derived from the ancient Greek word hegeisthai, meaning ‘to lead’. In the political scene, the dominant class leads subordinate classes. The most efficient mode of leadership is self-managed, where those in the subaltern position orient themselves of their own accord towards the interests of the hegemon. This is particularly effective at the level of everyday habitus, as we go about ordering our priorities and orienting our trajectories. This quotidian activity is grounded in our phenomenological being—not in the contingent levels on our decision-making focus, but in the evaluative dimensions by which we order priorities. This kind of hegemony operates not when we decide to become a lawyer or a banker, but in our overall interest in making our way up in the world. There are the evaluative dimensions that make a decision possible.

Some of the links between these phenomenological dimensions and power have been well studied. The dimension of light is one of the most pervasive. In developing the concept of ‘heliocentrism’,[2] Derrida traced light as a dominant trope of Western thought from Plato’s myth of the cave to the celebration of Enlightenment. But Derrida was also interested in the shadows cast by this trope. In order to shine the light on reason, shadows had to be cast over the darkness of the world. Such a metaphor colluded with the construction of empires through a slave trade that required the denial of empathy to those with darker complexions. Whether or not this metaphor was originally conceived in classical times as justification of empire, its reproduction during European colonisation was certainly allied to the control of colonised peoples.

As we noted in our rural scene, in being drawn towards light we are also oriented westwards. In the idea of West[3] that informed British colonisation, the setting sun signalled the future of the world. With the Enlightenment came a developmentalist position that placed the West at the forefront of historical time, and consigned the colonised world to backwardness.[4] Thus we have the hegemony of the already developed world over the still developing—the world that arrived first over the world that came in third.

The second dimension was towards the unique element. The privilege of the rare above the common is synonymous with hierarchy. The aristocratic control of rarity in the feudal times was eventually replaced by a bourgeois set of values that Bourdieu identifies as ‘distinction’.[5] From the post-revolutionary world emerged the great art galleries owned by the state and wealthy patrons. These galleries were filled with the singular world treasures, often looted from the periphery. And within the West, the cult of masterpieces was constructed through the invention of ‘genius’ as the gateway of value through rare gifted individuals. Genius is the gold standard by which the art market has flourished as a system of global money laundering for the elite of the elite.

When we attempt to visualise a hierarchical society, we often imagine a pyramid. Even a nation founded on democracy such as the United States of America takes the pyramid as its official seal. Designed in 1782, the US seal consists of an unfinished pyramid over which is an eye within a triangle, as a detached summit. The motto above Annuit cœptis—‘he approves of our undertakings’—is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. The motto below Novus ordo seclorum— ‘a new order of the ages’—also taken from Virgil, though in this case the Eclogue.

This eighteenth century design is a confident expression of a new republic, assured that its future destiny is to govern the world. As a committed democracy, the current is not underpinned with the portrait of a monarch. The summit of the pyramid is replaced by the single eye, representing providence.[6]

But rarity is not enough to account for the choice of pyramid as a symbol. It can equally be represented two-dimensionally by the centre of a circle. The pyramid is inevitably a symbol of verticality. Rarity ascends. The precious is elevated above the common. From this height, we can survey the vertical dimension that pervades our very understanding of what a hierarchy is. This dimension distinguishes superiors from their inferiors and high ideals from base motives. The upper classes rule over the lower classes. Our lofty ideals transcend shallow thinking. It seems something at the core of our being that we gaze upwards. Combined with the twin symbol of the eagle, the American dollar is predicated on this logic of verticalism that identifies power as a form of elevation above all.

Verticalism

Verticalism and power seems almost synonymous. There are strong reasons why we orient ourselves upwards. As noted by the art historian Rudolf Arnheim, the vertical dimension has gravity on its side.[7] Any physical force coming from above thus has an extra advantage over its opponent. And in terms of strategic information, the general who surveys troops from a hilltop has advantage over his rival in the valley. That power rises to the top seems too obvious even to articulate.

Yet there are countervailing valencies that favour the lower end. After all, the base of our world is solid. And in the ground lie buried the roots from which sustenance is gathered for the world above. Despite this alternative perspective, power is not seen to emanate from below, at least in the West. Verticalism is characteristic of the neo-Platonic tradition of thought, which raised ideas above the base world of matter.[8] Christian cosmology helped enforce this distinction with the image of a heaven above and a hell below.

We could very well then align this ‘verticalism’ alongside ‘heliocentrism’ as a dominant metaphor of Western thought. But does it bite? The metaphor of light was clearly complicit in the practice of slavery and colonisation of darker peoples. There seemed no obvious difference in the bodily heights of coloniser and colonised. So how did the imperial power come to be positioned above its subjects?

We have to step back and look at the world as a whole to see this vertical orientation of power. Drawing on the classical traditions of the world map-making, Ptolemy constructed a two-dimensional image of the world in which one part is arranged above another. As the classical concept of the antipodes was developed during the middle ages, this vertical order was aligned with a moral topography that contrasted the civilisation in the north from the savagery below. Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio presents a bipolar moral world:

This quarter of the earth, which is inhabited all the people with whom we can have any contact, verges towards the north pole, and the spherical shape of the earth causes the south pole to be plunged into the depths… The south pole, on the other hand, once buried from our sight, as it were, by the location of our abodes, will never show itself to us, nor the stars with which it is undoubtedly adorned. And this is what Virgil, knowing nature’s ways full well, meant when he said, ‘One pole is ever high above us, while the other, beneath our feet, is seen of black Styx and the shades infernal.’[9]

With the age of exploration and the conquest of the New World, the vertical orientation of north as up and south as down eventually became cartographical convention in the West.[10] But more than a code for specialist navigators, this northwards orientation has configured the very way in which we see ourselves in space.

Nowadays, north-centrism is a taken-for-granted element in how we orient ourselves around the world. Last week I told my family that I was flying up to Kuala Lumpar, and that on Friday I would be flying back down to Melbourne. Yet in terms of my experience this particular trajectory is largely horizontal. So how is it that our cognitive representation of movement so blatantly contradicts our immediate knowledge? I could have simply said ‘flying to Kuala Lumpar’. The ‘up’ is superfluous. There must be broader agendas at work in this vertical orientation of the world.

Going South

With the rudimentary understanding of North as up and South as down comes the use of these directions as metaphors of fortune. If something ‘goes South’, it inevitably indicates a downturn of fortune. This has a contemporary application in the global financial crisis. If you Google the phrase ‘market heads south’ you’ll find it used in many instances to ornament stories about plummeting stock values and declining profit lines.[11]

So it is ingrained in way the world views itself that the hegemon is positioned above the dominated, the north above the south and the first above the third world. The world is clearly not a level playing field. This coincidence of vertical value with cartography may seem trivial, but alongside the other hegemonic values that divide the coloniser from the colonised, it is at the least complicit with a global hierarchy. It is the subliminal ‘leg up’ that impels a talented worker to rise in the world, to find a position in the north.

We know this individual ambition broadly as aspirationalism. Here an individual orients his or her life towards escaping the plight of their class in order to enjoy the fruits of the class above them. In Australia, this is associated particularly with consumption of ever more valuable goods, such as four-wheel drives, and holidays in the North.

Now comes the challenge. Given the way in which verticalism is interwoven with our daily engagement of the world, how it be contested? How can we begin to unravel the structures on which the hegemony of the North is based?

I’d like briefly to outline three alternative paths. The first direction reverses our orientation entirely. How do we look down, rather than up?

Alternative paths

The carnivalesque response

A recent publication in Chile has identified this phenomenon as ‘arribismo’, roughly translated as up-ism. In Siútico: Arribismo, abajismo y vida social en Chile, Oscar Contardo[12] reflects on the particularly Chilean concern to be seen as different from its southern neighbours – as an ‘England of the Pacific’. Individually this upward passage is accessible by a number of different ladders. In Santiago, it is to have a house in the hills, particularly Las Condes, above the smog of the valley. Biologically, it is to have predominantly European genes, untainted by Mapuche blood. Arribismo (or up-ism) can be seen as a common phenomenon among the bourgeoisie of colonised societies who orient themselves towards the values of European colonisers above rather native cultures below.

What’s interesting about Cantardo’s book is that he heralds a counter trend growing in Chile, which he calls ‘abajismo’, or down-ism. This trend reflects the move down from the hills by the children of upper class parents in order to submerge themselves in the culture of the street, particularly in noisy neighbourhoods such as Bellavista. It is particularly fashionable to frequent low dives, where reside the Guachacas, the coarse ordinary Chilean folk with loud Ranchera songs, ribald jokes and comfort food. Optionally, this is accompanied by a taste for things indigenous, including Mapuche jewellery and Aymara weaving. Given its bourgeois origins, such taste is ripe for satire, as down-ism itself becomes an elite pursuit, akin to poverty chic of the Paris catwalks.

While there’s no doubt some truth in this, there are less cynical forces at play. This reversal of polarity is a distinctive feature of Chilean culture, evident particularly in the communist poetry of Pablo Neruda who praised the common. We see parallels in this across the south with a ‘rediscovery of the common’ evident in movements like poor craft in Australia.

One response to verticalism is thus to reverse the poles. In the case of class politics in a country like Chile, this involves identifying with the common in its honest coarseness. Such reversal can be understood as an up-turning of hierarchy, characteristic of the carnivalesque. While radical in the immediate sense, such gestures are often seen as short-term. They inevitably reinforce the axis of hierarchy as a whole.

Horizontalismo

An alternative direction was borne from the struggles in Latin America. Here the dominant alternative form of political thought proposes a right angle to verticalism. Horizontalismo has developed from the collective Marxism adopted by the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas province of Mexico. This became particularly relevant in guiding popular response to the economic crisis in Argentina at the beginning of this century.[13]

Here mass organisation on the street was seen to oppose the vertical orientation of power known as clientism in the era of Peron. Contrary to the organisation of masses through centralised media outlets, this movement occurs virally through messages posted on walls and word of mouth. This is dramatically expressed in the cacerola, a banging of pots that rippled through the barrios like a Mexican wave. Key to horizontalismo is the goal ‘to change the world without taking power’.

Complimentary to horizontalism is the emergence of relational aesthetics as an art form, particularly in the south-south gatherings of the South Project. Here the pyramid-like relation of artist and audience is replaced by the role of artist as an event-manager who brings people together. This is a collective art that is best read not by artistic expression but by group energy. Like the cacerola in Argentina, relational art events seem particularly effective in opening up spaces in a democracy for new forces to emerge. But questions arise about whether it be successful in sustaining these forces.

Horizontalism is vulnerable to the same kind of criticism of abajismo. While effective in breaking existing structures of power, it can be argued that it is not effective in creating alternative structures to replace them.

Lateralism

The final path forward involves a synthesis of abajismo and horizontalism. This involves a lateral association of southern cultures woven together through common projects.

In the context of this current workshop, the phenomenon of regionalism is seen as a relevant antidote to global hegemony. What I commend is a direction sympathetic to the various counter-hegemonic measures against verticalism. It is a direction which seeks to reverse polarities, construct a non-centred network, and understand the broader ecology of cultural values. It does this within a regional focus.

In the case of vertical structures of power, the kind of regional alliance that confronts this directly is along the lateral south-south axis. This is predominantly understood today as an alliance of low income nations against the more powerful Northern economies. But we can look at broadening this to include the post-colonial world which suffers from the inferiority complex orchestrated by perceiving ourselves to be the bottom of the world. We are conditioned to be looking North for recognition and way forward. The radical alternative here is to look sideways, to share our own commonalities rather than someone else’s ideals.

This lateral axis is still relatively undeveloped. There have been many proposals to find points of commonality in artistic expression. There are common southern hemisphere concerns, such as ocean life, Gondwana heritage and weather. And there are common Global South themes, such as the history of colonial commodities such as sugar and coffee.

One area of initial activity is in the construction of the methodology by which such work might be possible. In the case of understanding of southern cultures, it is important to review the Western concept of art that has been inherited as a focus on individual expression. There is much benefit to be gained in sharing paradigms for understanding languages of cultural expression particular to the South. And in terms of future activity, the prevalence of north-south activity in design-craft collaborations has the risk of a new kind of primitivism through ethical consumerism. The development of a Code of Practice to promote authentic partnerships seems an important step forward.

Conclusion

So if we return to our original scene, we find ourselves now back in the same position as we were before. But hopefully there is one critical difference. We can now begin to consider alternative paths. We can follow the western way, raising ourselves above others, riding off into the sunset. We can settle at the base of the mountain, enjoying the wildlife. Or we can move sideways, to find similar valley scenes where we can discuss our dilemma with others.

Recognising that choice exists is the first step.

Thanks to Kalak Kav for the landscape photograph.

[1] While relatively common, there is sometimes a cultural specificity to these values. Some cultures orient themselves towards the past—the east where the sun has risen. What is more universal is the very need to have an orientation in order to make passage through the world, to know where to go.

[2] Jacques Derrida ‘Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in (ed. ) Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass) London: Routledge, 1978 (orig. 1967)

[3] Loren Baritz ‘The Idea of the West’ The American Historical Review (1961) 66: 3, pp. 618-640

[4] All the peoples whose history is recorded fall somewhere between our present degree of civilization and that which we still see amongst savage tribes; if we survey in a single sweep the universal history of peoples we see them sometimes making fresh progress, sometimes plunging back into ignorance, sometimes surviving somewhere between these extremes or halted at a certain point, sometimes disappearing from the earth under the conqueror’s heel, mixing with the victors or living on in slavery, or sometimes receiving knowledge from some more enlightened people in order to transmit it in their turn to other nations, and so welding an uninterrupted chain between the beginning of historical time and the century in which we live, between the first peoples known to us and the present nations of Europe.

Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (trans. June Barraclough) London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson General, 1955 (orig. 1795), p. 8

[5] Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R. Nice) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984 (orig. 1974)

[6] Now, from our current end of history, as the American empire seems to be unravelling, the eye appears to presage the role of spectacle in the operation of global power.

[7] ‘In the vertical, the gravitational axis dominates the system.’ Rudolph Arnheim The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, p. 230

[8] This is particularly evident in the work of Plotinus, who reinforced the distinction between the eternal world of forms above from the transient realm of matter below—‘to lift clay into the heavens is against nature’ Plotinus The Enneads (trans. Stephen McKenna) New York: Pantheon, 1969 (orig. 270), p. 86

[9] Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (trans. William Harris Stahl) New York: Columbia University Press, 1952 (orig. 420), p. 153

[10] If the West had not proven to be the dominant power, we might be facing in the opposite direction. Arab cartography up to the time of the renaissance oriented maps to the south.

[11] But this idiom can also have an alternative reading, purely incidental. In many cases it means simply the relocation of business to the physical South, particularly the southern states of the USA. As a metaphor, South sits uneasily between idiom of decline and geographic region.

This ambivalence can sometimes be quite ironic, as in the title of an article in the Australian, ‘Australia goes south in the first guide to the Oscars’. Isn’t Australia already south? It appears that the story is about the absence of likely prospects for Australian film to win one of those precious trophies, the Academy Award.

[12] Oscar Contardo Siútico: Arribismo, abajismo y vida social en Chile Santiago: Vergara, 2008

[13] See Marina Sitrin Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina AK Press, 2006