Archive: Arena Quarterly #9

Intellectuals and Social Being

Marx makes many references to how ideas are related to a social basis, but Sohn-Rethel regards it of great significance that science escapes this focus.  Elaborating no social basis for scientific ideas allows them to stand alone as essentials to be simply taken for granted, their source and social formation unquestioned.

What Did East Timor Do To Deserve Us?

Binoy Kampmark

9 Jun 2022

Even on the eve of East Timorese independence, Australian establishment forces around the pro-Jakarta lobby rallied with monochromatic consistency.

Chile: Dismantling the Dictatorship

Rodrigo Acuña

16 May 2022

In Australia Chilean activists and researchers will continue to press to declassify the archive, which would reveal the extent of Canberra’s intelligence activities in helping to overthrow a democratically elected government at the behest of Washington.

Gentle Creatures: Brisbane’s bush stone curlews in the shadow of extinction

Dean Biron

16 May 2022

Now it is the curlew that crouches like a ghost in the shadows of all of those lost creatures, waiting for that future time when it too will exist only in photographs or behind museum glass.

Exposure: COVID and the long, cold winter of the American homeless

If biopolitics is power that is realised through the organisation of how people live, then necropolitical power is realised through dictating the limits of who gets to live and who dies.

Anti-Material Functions

John Kinsella

29 Apr 2022

For me, poetry and art are anti-material functions, and it's their ephemerality that is relevant: they should be recyclable and renewable and impermanent. Anti-structures.

Threading the Needle: A Review of John Lyons’ Dateline Jerusalem

Lyons has been witness to the activities of the pro-Israel lobby in Australia, as Zionist functionaries relentlessly and deliberately intimidate newspapers and other media organisations into self-censorship...

Loving Machines: Mental Health by Algorithm Is Reshaping Care and Sociality

Woebot may sit at the outer rim of digital mental health technologies, but we can see the shape and trajectory it implies for understanding mental health, the care relation and, beyond that, the person generally. Where the CBT-AI combination sets up a relentlessly positive artificial other—an interlocutor that is never awkward or demanding, and becomes naturalised as ‘what I like’—real-world relationships are bound to be found unsatisfactory.

Wayward Growths: Permaculture, low tech and the ‘Freedom Movement’

Because permaculture is perceived as benign, generally harmless and peace-loving, its presence at freedom rallies speaks against the impression that the far Right is violent and dangerous.

The Left’s Right Turn: Behind the media myth of neoliberal Blairite social ‘achievements’

Are UK Labour and other such subverted parties globally that are ostensibly of the Left still worth voting for?

A Light Shining in the Shire

The last decade has seen the failure of the centrist form of neoliberal progressivism that occupied the left parties in the face of an onslaught by right-wing populism, which mobilised forces old and new to present themselves…as a response on behalf of the people against the entire ‘political/media’ class, as represented by those in power.

The Heat is Still On: Climate and life at 3 degrees

Climate change is a health risk. What can the response to COVID-19 teach us about climate policy making?