Preliminary definitions

In Disco Elysium (2019) by ZA/UM, the pale is an inter-continental tissue dividing the different pockets of physical reality, known as isolas. The pale can only be observed/measured by what it isn’t: it returns no light and where it borders the periphery of the world there is an uproar of matter, described by Joyce Messier — the CEO of a shipping company hiring private military contractors to kill a union strike — as “a great vision”. Only by use of a Pale Latitude Compressor is dimensionality forced onto the pale, a line between A and B plotted, A and B themselves conceivable, even.

The first navigators of the pale, at the direction of the Great Innocence Dolores Dei, either were lost or returned constitutively disassociated from whatever they’d been. You meet a pale-trucker, driving contraband through regions of land-based Pale, experiencing the memories of someone dead/not-yet-born, watching movies in a different country. Phone calls, number station recordings, echoes from a public execution 100 years ago can be picked up, condensed. “Others argue that the pale somehow *consists* of past information, that’s degrading. That it’s rarefied past, not rarefied matter.”

A giant stick-insect later adds that the pale developed with human minds “no one remembers it before you. The cnidarians do not, the radially symmetricals do not.” What constructs the Mind, as a notion, also constructs the pale, like carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere/ microplastics in your blood. The game states that the pale’s horizon is getting larger/accelerating.

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“In the period immediately after the Norman Settlement was constructed the barrier, known as the “Pale,” separating the lands occupied by the settlers from those remaining in the hands of the Irish. This barrier consisted of a ditch, raised some ten or twelve feet from the ground, with a hedge of thorn on the outer side. It was constructed, not so much to keep out the Irish, as to form an obstacle in their way in their raids on the cattle of the settlers, and thus give time for a rescue. The Pale began at Dalkey, and followed a south-westerly direction towards Kilternan; then turning northwards passed Kilgobbin, where a castle still stands, and crossed the Parish of Taney to the south of that part of the lands of Balally now called Moreen, and thence in a westerly direction to Tallaght, and on to Naas in the County of Kildare.”

Ball, F.Erlington; Hamilton, Everard ,The Parish of Taney: A History of Dundrum, near Dublin, and Its Neighbourhood (1895)

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The Pale of Settlement (Rus. Cherta [postoyannoy yevreyskoy] osedlosti) was a territory within the borders of czarist Russia wherein the residence of Jews was legally authorized. Limits for the area in which Jewish settlement was permissible in Russia came into being when Russia was confronted with the necessity of adjusting to a Jewish element within its borders, from which Jews had been excluded since the end of the 15^th century. These limitations were consonant with the general conception of freedom of movement of persons which then applied. At the time, most of the inhabitants of Russia, not only the serfs but also townsmen and merchants, were deprived of freedom of movement and confined to their places of residence.

Modern Jewish History: the pale of settlement

Isola. 1

I’m on Victoria St. yesterday. Cops shot a friend in the ribs with a rubber bullet — the same bullet that took off a reporter’s ear at the Disrupt Land Forces actions. They’re recovering, eating a pay-what-you-will burger. I’m at the Webb Docks, for the initial blockade.

I’m at the Webb Docks encampment, as it’s forcibly broken up. A friend is arrested and charged. I and you — you’re involved as well — in however many places/times.

I’m at the encampment at the university of Melbourne, Mahmoud’s Hall during the student occupation. It is announced that no divestment of the university’s direct funding by — and of — weapon companies (you can see the circulatory system laid out every day, with ease: every commodity—which is to say every social space/structure or rule, is a cipher of it, or an analogy, between a heavenly and earth-bound piece of data) involved in Israel’s genocide of Palestine is forthcoming, despite specific gains. Disclosure of that funding will be mediated by an independent body of the student’s choice, “subject to confidentiality obligations, national security regulations and laws, and the safety and security of our researchers.”

The encampment, and its self-constituting leadership, demobilises, piece by piece, as accords are struck. At the encampment lending library, a book of interviews with Antonio Negri. In organising, the motions of assembly and disassembly — constitution and destitution — become a second nature, still the end that organisation is supposed to reach toward. A member of the Blak People’s Union is compared to Peter Dutton for suggesting that economic migrants are participants in settler colonialism and/or racial capitalism, that Australia exists as an actual entity/non settler-colony. Someone has scrawled “Israel is an illegitimate state” in a bathroom on campus and no-one has pointed out the tautology. A certain kind of organisation, a certain kind of constitution and destitution, at the very least, remains normal, whether it’s affirmed or critiqued. At the camps, at the blockade, the weekly protests, the world prefigured — a world in which the genocide could never occur, or think to occur — is one that, in Marx’s words

mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between [itself] and nature. [It] confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature.

Isola. 2

Videos and infographics of the Zionist destruction of olive trees, of rotted flour parachuted, crushing bodies, embargo of food aid at the Gaza border by lynch mobs, the specific denial of food sovereignty by destruction of the land and air.  Metabolism is ruptured and appropriated. If fascism is always in excess of its object — the crowds weeping, the retention of dying IOF semen to preserve a warrior strain, the calls to condemn Hamas for an orgy of dysgenic baby murder that didn’t take place, in person, online —  then the pleasure derived from making Palestinians conform to the image the Zionist entity makes for them  — mixing seeds and animal feed into bread, accounting for shortage — is as much a part of its colonial fantasies than the occupation of territory. It defines the full scope of what needs to be conquered: a land, a people and a specific relationship.

An infographic describes what it calls the ‘indigenous idea’ of soul death, through quoting Aimé Césaire:

A beast that by the elementary exercise of its vitality spills blood and sows death — you remember that historically it was in the form of this fierce archetype that capitalist society first revealed itself to the best minds and consciences.

For a desert to become the garden of Eden — or even Euro-Disneyland — olive trees must be uprooted. If capital is dead labour vampirised from the living, which is to say dispossessed, what does that say about capitalist society’s vitality, which is to say its relationship to the metabolism of itself and nature? It would be easy to point out settler-colonial capitalism’s extractive nature, its self-consumption.

I am sitting at the Unimelb encampment with friends, shooting shit. That’s not the point. Marx writes

 if money, according to Marie Augier comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping ,from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt

which is to say there has never been a time, even before it was called capitalism, that its vitality has never not been absent to itself, in perpetual debt, and in need of compensation. It marks an exchange between life and death, one delineating the border between the two, setting them into determinative roles. A laboratory for necropolitics, which is to say the politics of accumulation. The uprooting of olive trees is proof: we, the renovators, are marked as living, and they — the trees, the water, the people — as dead, rootless. An Instagram post glossesthe term “necropolitics” used by Achille Mbembe:

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.

It lays out an episteme, and practice of Reason, in which the horizon and starting point are both decided by genocide: the performance of settler rationality becomes the mark of who may live; its non-performance/ transgression/indifference — the olive trees are not rational, how could they be? someone says — a sign of inevitable extinction, which can only do good to accelerate.

To naturalise reason, in this sense, means to graft a system of ends onto the world, for which questions of ontology are beside the point. “Nature” is miraculated onto processes of settler-production; it becomes possible to talk of “laws” of nature, of human nature and “human biodiversity”, in the same gesture. “Life”, let alone political life — as Mbembe says — is that portion of the natural that is made legible to colonial power. More accurately, nature is defined in retrospect: nature is what is left over, between what is made legible/malleable to colonial power, and what resists it, what is excreted/rejected as unhealthy to the political body. Eugenics is the logical end-point of this. A body is stitched together, its organs defined, and then purified according to a deduced rationality. Genocide is a pruning or — when applied to people — a gesture of husbandry. Who could say otherwise? In so-called Israel as in so-called Australia, a eugenic of larrikin settler rationality/ecocide defines a ‘person’.

Isola. 3

As a child, Leila Khaled describes herself

burdened by the adult problems of life and death, right and wrong. I, as a dreamer, living on the bare subsistence provided by a blue UN ration card

Endless videos on Instagram of children. A poem by Ghassan Kanafani, ending with the lines

Where were you? they would say,
We were playing in the clouds

Something for children — not the institution of childhood, something else, the time they’re robbed of, you want to imagine  — can now only be encoded.

On the other hand, this is sentimentality. A post on an Instagram page about how, even now, Gazan children maintain their cheerfulness/enthusiasm for life is shared. If you search “Gaza children” on Instagram, numerous posts say otherwise. There is a fragmentation of their image across social media, whatever medium they appear in: text, photography, video, a puddle of water. Any war entails this fragmentation, especially if the alternative is erasure by the Zionist machine: adults in their late twenties in brown-face mocking the death while implying it’s an act, that the genocide isn’t taking place, that any child murdered is a neutralised Hamas operative by default.

The Palestinian activist Mohammed Jamous has aggregated the images of children — every kind of image — into a mosaic of larger, distorted faces, to simulate the hyperreal slop-quality of machine generated imagery, ghoulish children sitting in a bombed street. The fascistic element of AI art — the fact that an image is only representational, can only work according to a mode of spectatorship in which fidelity to representation (of an idea, of a bodily type, of tropes) is the only critical standard; what is represented is constituted as true a priori, truth and beauty are one, and the quality of art is only how well this truth is represented/ assented to by a subject viewer — becomes, here, an injunction to closer reading, that there is something, in fact, to read. You can barely see the submerged collage of atomic photos: you have to look closer; a critical position is forced on you in your observation. Zionist propaganda, and fascist propaganda more broadly, is the opposite of this: there is nothing to see but the image or symbol, and nothing to interpret but the official narrative, the language of the ideal coloniser/ solipsist.

Isola. 4

What does this all add up to? What does this say/repeat? It’s a different time; we’re working outwards. Anthony Albanese’s office posts to twitter condemning Iran for its missile attack on Israel, as “extremely dangerous escalation”, or claiming that “Australia and the global community has been clear in our calls for de-escalation,” and that continuing hostilities will simply be a threat to innocent civilians.

The violence of the colony always results in this solipsism, predicated on a split — there is no genocide and if there were it began on October 7. The violence of the colonised/subaltern is escalatory, dangerous to valued life, while our violence was actually administration/ a surgical clearing of space — and is fuelled by the constitution of this solipsism, to inaugurate it in space: a “social cohesion” that it would feel reductive to call internally contradictory, or productive of contradiction in a dialectical sense.

To hold to a certain idea of contradiction is to take the disinterestedness of settler-rationality, reframed as Rationality writ large, at face value. A video on Instagram of people breaking into an Elbit factory to damage weapons bound for the genocide, in the name of International Human Rights, has a comment (since deleted) that reads

I have some bad news about International Human Rights and the production of genocide.

To note that the Zionist entity has murdered more non-combatants than Hamas or Hezbollah — to work through the contradiction — is to miss the point. Acts of genocide make their own justification, because what they kill, by a colony’s naturalised law, has always been destined to die. It creates a prehistoric, pre-determined world in real time. It works to exclude or neutralise any conceptual opposition or sense of internal, generalised contradiction that may threaten the colony. We can think of Carl Schmitt, his comments on the concept of humanity:

Humanity as such and as a whole has no enemies. Everyone be- longs to humanity … “Humanity” thus becomes an asymmetrical counter-concept. If he discriminates within humanity and thereby denies the quality of being human to a disturber or destroyer, then the negatively valued person becomes an unperson, and his life is no longer of the highest value: it becomes worthless and must be destroyed.

“Humanity” — in this generalised sense — can only be present to the colonial state as a challenge to its monopoly on life/death, its figuration of nature. If it only appears to Schmitt as a counter-concept, it’s because the actions of this state/necropolitical capital can only pre-define the scope of “humanity” according to its needs, and eugenic ends. Whatever humanity exists outside the colonial apparatus exists to be processed, and insofar as this humanity resists, the colony is at jeopardy, its own metrics of humanity, life/death, its relationship to the natural, and its law-giving potential, fundamentally unrealisable. It becomes unpersoned — exceptionalised — itself, so long as it can’t naturalise its eugenic/foundational violence.

And so, the olive trees are up-rooted. The end-production of a colonial project is a smooth space that only spreads to convert a given ecology — here the total of relations between a given people and the land, a given relationship to the world — into a site of extraction and coding: imported names on a map/a blank page/broken paragraphs whose only notable features are already metaphor, commercial infrastructure and six-lane highways.

Terra Nullius must be continually re-asserted: it can’t be maintained theoretically — it refers to nothing but itself; the question of what it refers to, by what power, becomes an admission that the state is not present, that its monopoly on life and death can be disputed — but it can be prolonged, to the point of universal entropy, in axioms of transmissibility/maximum receptivity to the abstracting of labour, relations of production, property, the haemorrhage of racializing capital. That is to say, maximum reconciliation to the possibility — and a lawful ordering — of death.

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The purpose of a system is what it does. Is that right? I am at Catalyst Social Centre, on Sydney Road, for a meeting of the Renters and Housing Union. Someone I met at a protest outside the Crown Casino, when Albanese was there, run by Students for Palestine — a front for Socialist Alliance; their members are placed at certain points in the crowd amplifying the chants, signing people up for their newsletter, trying to sell Kufiyahs and Jumpers with the Palestinian colours, fidelity to the representative — invites me. It is less death than becoming permanently uprooted. “Death” is not present, in the same way vitality is not present to a capitalist society except by its presumed absence, like God. In death’s absence, it is made immanent to a logic one is encouraged to adopt/organise, to thrive in a settler-colony. It is floating around the edge of every reading group, solidarity network, journal reading, food not bombs dinner and co-op on stolen land.  If Aileen Moreton-Robinson describes the privileges of colonisers as

unearned, invisible assets … in their everyday lives; they are possessions

it is a possessive, non-reflexive, instrumentalised logic that defines the necropolitical economy, the role of which is to deduce from the virtuality of death the behaviours/affects/not-yet final solutions to the problems that the settler colony creates to prolong itself, electrons orbiting an empty nucleus: the vanishing point where technocratic neo-liberalism and ethno-nationalism edge up to each other, infinitesimally.

It’d be wrong to call this alienation, in a Marxist sense: it is the cut which makes alienation possible, which charges it. This production of a concrete emptiness, that nonetheless takes up and organises space, AI art, discourse, social existence, kneads it — like a collapsing star bends gravity, to better border it — we can call a pale. In a very direct sense, to quote the 4chan Nazis, nothing is happening, nothing is occupying a place. “Death”, figured politically, is just where a pale meets what falls outside it, what counters it.

Isola. 5

On a regular day, you can see Isola 4 From Isola 5, make out physical details through the static and crackling information-flare. Some say they can see versions of themselves, in the same position relative to the isola they occupy now, except something is off-centre/they become aware that they themselves are off-centre, that their stance is the sum of however mystified intellectual and stylistic flourishes, passed off disaffectedly. That is the gamble, that a gesture can ward away/occlude a dawning horror/sense of vertigo. Gilles Deleuze will say, in a similar tone: “in effect, the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense , of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same.” A shudder, and thrill.

At the RAHU meeting, the members are debating whether to rename the north branch to something that reflects the Wurundjeri name for that area. I was a member of the north branch, almost two years ago. I left with all the other trans femmes at the time, over accepting a grant from the Mirribek council. How can a union we thought — member-run, so-called — effectively contest the political sphere that housing opens up, the demand that everyone be housed as a matter of course, while tying itself to the legal framework of a colony? What can it do but reproduce colonial subjects, or sanction a relationship to the land that — in Terra Nullius — a leftist organisation nominally rejects?

At a strategy day, two years ago, discussing branches in the northern territory, someone observed that the category of a universal renter — transposed from a European mythology of rentiers, their relationship to the land/ developing capital, tied now with a specific history of racialized exclusion from housing, profiling and dispossession, undergirded by the NT intervention as state-acceleration of colonial policy — hides more than it helps organise. They are recognised and dismissed thereafter. Some people suggest “RAHU north of the river”, according to what someone says the translation of Naarm is, or just RAHU Naarm north.

The current general secretary of RAHU is making an effort to buddy up with the Blak Peoples Union, a friend says, partly out of noblesse oblige, partly to ride their coattails. They co-ordinate a badly run joint workshop on squatting. This week, it is announced the squatting campaign has been put on indefinite hold, as there are too many campaigns on the go.

The pale is here, too, in the bloat of settler organisations and the metastasis of a specific language with them. As an settler-organisation expands, and has to confront its place in the colonial machine, it substitutes its own structures and terminology, its ideological read of the terrain, for a decolonial analysis. Bureaucracy and technocratic language expand, tissue over a gap that can’t be touched, acknowledged or resolved; the pale could almost be seen as a bureaucracy of space, an algorithm for the creation and border of internal colonies, down to the individual level. The virtual sprawl of these concepts, their symbolic mapping laid over the land, becomes the basis for any liberal Zionism, and Zion is always the stop where the colony terminates, the capital away from the capital.

The specific individuals in this case, roped into housing organisations or autonomous Signal groups, are the trans people I know, though this applies to every point of a social order. An organisation like RAHU runs off the surplus labour of the groups most at risk of housing insecurity while still being able to rent. It is a fundamentally colonial gesture, to turn solidarity into patrimony, extended from a settler organisation to those excluded by its very nature, dividing blocs of people along lines of legibility to property even as they seek to abolish it.

These are the same people organising outside of official structures for Palestine on a regular basis. The question of housing is important here because it is the border-line, where the colony reproduces itself most nakedly, where dispossession, eugenic violence and death perform their functions, and where the pale becomes readable in embryo.

Burnout is inevitable, thorough and addictive. The point of settler organisations is the production of burnout, the transference of burnout into an organising principle/an affective investment in a self-perpetuating structure. Even in structures nominally opposed to the colony and racial capital, the logic of the pale is reproduced, in the thinking, organisational outline and world-view of members. Political agency and freedom is associated, if not with the relation of property, then with ‘housing’ — or perhaps Dwelling — and its euro-modern connotations.

Whenever there is a rejection of Land Back as a principle/praxis by the settler left, stripped of its theoretical armature, often it amounts to a half-spoken gut-sense of What else can we do? we’re here now. We have to play the card we’re dealt; the only way is through, Be in difference. A total critique of the capitalist system, the racist necropolitics undergirding it, disappear further and further into a horizon in which we’ll reach the goal soon enough, if the right campaigns are won, members recruited and structures developed. It’s a dispossessing logic that orders according to the privilege accorded by settler logic: every economic migrant practices the right of return, every exhausted sex-worker transsexual settler, working in the grey market, can be snatched up into a housing network and can begin believing that infiltrating Midsumma is a revolutionary gesture.

The telos of the organisation — be it the end of settler capitalism or its endless reproduction, stretching into absence, coming to fill more and more of the settler organiser’s horizon, sprawling out in pointless administration — is made equivalent to the working of death, endlessly re-cutting Terra Nullius out of the land, endlessly re-subordinating whatever emerges to its power. A fog of war.

Isola 6.

(When the ships had made it through the pale, as land materialised out of the fog boundaries, according to those onboard, bowing to Dolores Dei on return to Mundi, the captain poeticised it “après le monde, la pale; après la pale, le monde de nouveau”, playing on the double meaning: the new world, or equally the world again/ once more. Walter Benjamin, glossing Carl Schmitt, would write: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.”)

A year has passed. I’m no-where in particular. In a 2021 Liminal interview, siblings Jeanine and Hasib Hourani talk about the consolidation representing Palestine entails in a hostile media environment, predicated on legibility to whiteness, the work of memory done in genocide:

Not only do we have to self-teach and memorise this history, there’s the labour of recovering hidden, destroyed, and censored information in the first place. We’re archaeologists too.

A two-fold pain, insisting on the existence of what the coloniser has tried to erase, if only to affirm what has been destroyed, what was once alive, and what still is. The olive trees were older than the founding of the Zionist entity: they speak to the nature of resistance to occupation, even as they are uprooted, then converted into another data-piece in Zionist terraforming efforts. It is to insist that Zionist policy is violence, and not merely the administration of life. If there is a dialectical contradiction to speak of, it is not one predicated on the division into strict class blocs, but the status that violent decolonial struggle assumes against the state’s ordering of life, death and nature, and the pale. Frantz Fanon wrote that

We have seen that this same violence, though kept very much on the surface all through the colonial period, yet turns in the void. We have also seen that it is canalized by the emotional outlets of dance and possession by spirits; we have seen how it is exhausted in fratricidal combats. Now the problem is to lay hold of this violence which is changing direction. When formerly it was appeased by myths and exercised its talents in finding fresh ways of committing mass suicide, now new conditions will make possible a completely new line of action.

The violence the colony must use to naturalise itself, to vampirise its vitality in acts of dispossession/accumulation, is one that — when it is not converting land into material — must frame violent resistance as a fundamental break in its monopoly over life and death, over the land. If the colony must invoke a continuous state of exception to vampirise the land, in response to the emptiness of Terra Nullius, gambling its vitality, creating the pale, then violent resistance against the colony pushes back against the pale in the most direct way, back onto the colony and its relational logics, breaking down and composting them. Resistance to the colony calls its bluff, and — in the words of Walter Benjamin —

calls every victory that has ever been won by the rulers into question.

It is to locate in the state of exception/emergency that naturalises the colony and fascist administration of nature the introduction of the real state of emergency, the violence that breaks down the pale and with it the necropolitical structures of a ghostly Terra Nullius, endlessly taking up space in the world. It is a moment in which to establish new lines of action, as Fanon might call them, or — according to Deleuze — lines of power.

If, as liberals claim, Palestine is teaching us to be free/alive/about the meaning of resistance, it is a reification of this re-making of lines of power, re-making connections that the colony is predicated on destroying, and then burying. It entails support for violent resistance— Palestinian Intifada, as much as the Algerian Liberation Front, as much as the IRA— as much as It entails a re-wilding of struggle, concurrent with the vitality of destroyed shards that the Houranis refer to, a state in which the land itself is brought to bear against the Zionist machine — every fascism is a Zionism — as the struggle is escalated, beyond acts of individual direct action, to a planetary intifada/crisis.