The DHS and Institutional Racism

The notion of ‘institutional racism’ is something of a misnomer because racism is always ‘institutional’ in the sense that it always involves the institution of ideology. And ideology is never just ‘personal’, i.e. purely individual preferences; with John B. Thompson we can define ideology as meaning that serves to establish and develop durable relations of domination within or between social groups (1).

In the case of racist ideologies, the meaning tends to take the form of racist stereotypes. As noted by Richard Dyer and Stuart Hall, stereotypes occur when someone gets hold of a few simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognized characteristics of a person or social group, and then reduces everything about the person (or the social group) to those ‘traits’. As part of this process, the characteristics tend to be exaggerated and simplified, fixed for all time, and then used to split off those who are stereotyped from those who aren’t (2). The agents of racism frequently combine two or more forms of stereotyping (e.g. ‘racial’ and religious, or ‘racial’ and economic).

Racist stereotyping may serve to exclude its victims from access to economic, social and/or symbolic capital (social prestige). But it may also work to increase the symbolic capital of those who promote it. While explicit racism may have the opposite effect in some contexts—witness what happened recently to Dr James Watson(3)—the agents of racist ideologies more often than not learn to rationalise or otherwise dissimulate their racism by making appeals to science, to social justice, the maintenance of a certain social order, and so forth.

So racism always entails some sort of institutional process, if only because ideology is itself always ‘institutional’ in the sense that EcoLogics has just outlined. It is nevertheless possible to speak of specifically ‘institutional’ racism when concrete organisations (public, private, or hybrid) engage in practices that are not only systematically racist over time, but which enable their members to express, and/or ‘apply’ their racism in concrete circumstances. Two examples: political parties based on racist tickets, and state institutions devoted to establishing and/or policing racist categories.

* * *

On October 29, the BBC carried news (4) of what sounds very much like an example of the latter form of institutional racism, but this time in the United States. Shahid Malik, a man described by the BBC as ‘Britain’s first Muslim Minister’—a label is arguably itself a racialised description—was stopped and searched for explosives by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on his way back to Britain. According to the BBC, Malik had flown to Washington to attend a series of ‘meetings on tackling terrorism’.

Apparently the same thing happened to Malik in 2006: according to the BBC, the DHS invited Malik to be a keynote speaker in an event about ‘tackling extremism and defeating terrorism’. Although he would have been a British MP by that point and would presumably have carried a UK diplomatic passport, he was still searched, and was indeed the target of what Malik himself describes as an ‘abusive attitude’. The apologies that Malik received after that episode clearly made no difference when it came to re-visiting the U.S. in 2007—this time not just as a member of the British parliament, but as a minister of the British government.

In the wake of these episodes, and in the context of other reports of racist abuse (5), a number of questions need to be asked of the DHS, as well as of all those who might take the DHS’s role for granted.

First, why and how exactly did the agents of the DHS decide to target Malik for extra searches?

Second, once they did so, why did the agents of the DHS disregard what must have been a diplomatic passport (such a passport is normally a guarantee of fast-tracking in airports)?

Third, does the DHS regard anyone whom it can label as a ‘Muslim’ as being more likely to be a ‘terrorist’? This is, of course, a racist stereotype, and if the answer is affirmative, that makes the DHS institutionally racist. If the answer is not affirmative, but if this is still the DHS’s de facto policy (e.g. stopping and searching anyone who ‘looks Muslim’[sic]), then that too, would make the DHS institutionally racist.

Fourth, if it was indeed the DHS that invited Malik to speak about ‘tackling terrorism’, should we conclude that institutional racism is so ingrained in the DHS that the organisation’s management was incapable of stopping racism amongst its own agents in the airport?

Or fifth, would cynics be right to conclude that Malik was something of a disposable pawn in the war against terrorism, somebody useful but still contemptible to the people who invited him to the US in the first place?

Alternatively, could it even be that Malik said ‘the wrong thing’ in his presentation, and so was ‘punished’ by the DHS when he traveled out of the US?

* * *

This episode provides evidence, if any were needed, of what can happen even to New Labour ministers when they unleash the twin dogs of racism and surveillance. If this sounds like a non sequitur, let us not forget that it was Jack Straw, the current Justice Minister, who ignited the political row about the wearing of veils last year (6). And indeed, Malik himself was only too happy to wade into that row almost exactly a year ago (7).

EcoLogics is reminded of Niemöller famous ‘anthem’, the subject of this blog’s first post.

References

1) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.

2) Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the Other’ in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997, p. 258.

3) see S. Rose, ‘Watson’s bad science’, October 21, 2007, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/steven_rose/2007/10/watsons_bad_science.html, accessed October 29, 2007.

4) ‘Minister detained at US airport’, October 29, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7066944.stm, accessed October 29, 2007.

5) see for example ‘Muslim traveller mistreated in Pinellas County Jail’, St. Petersburg Times, December 27, 2006, http://www.sptimes.com/2006/12/27/Tampabay/Muslim_traveller_mist.shtml?loc=interstitialskip, accessed October 29, 2007.

6) ‘In quotes: Jack Straw on the veil’ October 13, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5413470.stm, accessed October 29, 2006.

7) ‘MP tells veil woman [sic] “let it go”’, October 20, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6069012.stm, accessed October 29, 2007.

Some Inconvenient Truths?

Last week the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007.

No sooner had it done so than an English judge became an unlikely adjudicator with respect to the degree of convenience incurred by Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. According to Mr Justice Burton—or rather, to media representations of his adjudication (1)—the film contained ‘nine scientific errors’, and this meant that it would be illegal for the UK government to continue to distribute the film to schools unless it did so with ‘updated’ guidelines.

It is tempting to go through each of these ‘errors’ and to consider whether they really are errors, or whether they involve matters that are subject to scientific controversy. Empiricist commentators in the UK and elsewhere have a certain historical notoriety for being unwilling (or unable) to distinguish between error and ambiguity, or to recognise the possibility that interpretation can be factual just as facts can be a matter of interpretation. This being the case, one wonders if Mr Justice Burton would have reached the conclusion that climate change was itself a matter of ‘scientific error’ just a few years ago.

Whatever the case, one thing is quite clear today: contrary to what might be inferred from many newspaper’s headlines, Burton disagrees with aspects of the film, rather than with the overall argument of the film vis-à-vis climate change. This is a point that both environmentalists and Gordon Brown’s government are keen to emphasize. What strange bedfellows they make.

* * *

The school governor who brought the case against the British government has been exposed as a member of a party (the ‘New Party’) that is funded by what the Observer describes as a ‘Scottish quarrying magnate’(2). And yet the party’s ‘National Policy Committee’ who’s who page suggests that the party is made up of ‘ordinary people of all walks of life’(3). Hmmm.

Then again, New Labour itself is not exactly the greenest of parties in power, is it? If you haven’t done so yet, have a look at what is happening in Ffos-y-fran, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.

Given this and countless other New Labour environmental ‘peccadilloes’, one might pose what is perhaps a very naïve question: why should New Labour be promoting An Inconvenient Truth in secondary schools? And indeed, shouldn’t its politicians be joining the New Party?

A cynic might suggest that the film works well for New Labour’s image-making apparatus. Here is a party that is championing a film that really lays bare the reality of climate change (or so the party’s image-making apparatchiks might hope that the ‘punters’ will think). But does the film really do that?

Many years ago, Guy Debord presciently described what he referred to as the ‘society of spectacle’. Debord coined this term to refer to the emergence of modern societies whose ‘WHOLE LIFE’ presented itself ‘as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived’, Debord suggested, had now become ‘mere representation’. He argued that ‘IMAGES DETACHED FROM every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever’. ‘Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation’(4).

Could it be that An Inconvenient Truth — in a manner not unlike The Day After Tomorrow — helps to transform climate change into such an object (an object of contemplation), and into a ‘pseudo-world apart’ from the everyday realities, and politics of the UK? If so — and this is a big if — what might be the benefits of such a dynamic for New Labour?

References

1) see for example ‘Gore climate film’s “nine errors”’ in BBC online, October 11, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7037671.stm. Accessed October 15, 2007.
2) see ‘Revealed: the man behind court attack on Gore film’, in GuardianUnlimited, October 14, 2007. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2190770,00.html, accessed October 15, 2007.
3) See http://www.newparty.co.uk/about/nationalcommittee.html, accessed October 15, 2007.
4) capital letters in the original text. In The Society of Spectacle, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith, London: Zone Books, 1994, p. 12.

You and Your DNA

It looks like the BBC has done it again: it has broadcast another programme that contributes to what I have described in other posts as the Gattacaization of the UK. This time the ‘culprit’ is You and Yours, a programme that the BBC’s Radio 4 broadcasts from Monday to Friday between 12 and 1pm. The BBC describes You and Yours as a ‘consumer affairs programme’, and indeed many of the You and Yours programmes provide a forum for listener phone-ins about controversial subjects and the peccadilloes committed by public and private corporations in the UK. A favourite You and Yours format begins with an introduction to a subject, and then invites listeners to call in with their views. So it was on September 25, 2007(1), when the subject of debate was New Labour’s ‘universal’ DNA database.

When I started to listen to the programme I began to hope that it would offer a critical perspective on the database. In marked contrast to the Today programme interview (the subject of some of my previous analyses), You and Yours began by explaining that ‘Maintaining and developing the database is one of the government’s top priorities, over 300 million pounds has been invested in the last five years.’ The programme also explained that ‘Last Autumn Tony Blair called for the DNA database to be expanded to include every UK citizen.’ It even spelled out the fact that the database was growing by 30,000 samples a month taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes—an aspect that has received little attention thus far and which presumably means that if you happen to drop a hair or shed some skin anywhere near what subsequently becomes a crime scene, your DNA too, might well become a part of the UK’s growing DNA database. Small wonder then that, as the programme noted, DNA samples have doubled to four million in the last five years.

So the programme got off to what sounded like a good start. But things began to go downhill when the ‘experts’ for and against the database were brought in. Actually, they weren’t quite ‘brought in’, if by this one means that they were brought physically to the You and Yours studio. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, the editors of You and Yours simply used the same Today programme interview given by Lord Justice Stephen Sedley some weeks ago, but broke it up into a series of fragments that were then juxtaposed with similarly fragmentary bits of an interview given by the Baroness Helena Kennedy QC to a third programme, the BBC’s Law in Action. Lord Justice Sedley was presented as the expert in favour of the DNA database, and was described not just as ‘the senior appeals court judge’, but as the ‘president of the Commission of Human Rights’. For her part, Helena Kennedy was treated as the expert ‘against’ the database, and was introduced as ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, the outgoing chair of the Human Genetics Commission’, who ‘isn’t keen on the idea’. In fact, and as my transcript below shows, at least the bits of the Kennedy interview that were recycled by You and Yours suggest that Kennedy is quite keen on the DNA database, if not on the universal DNA database (2).

Here is the transcript of what she said (I have already transcribed the Sedley interview in another post, so will not do so below again; you may wish to see a transcript of that interview first by visiting my earlier posts).

Sedley [Where we are at the moment is indefensible…]

Kennedy: The public are very supportive of the police having access to the DNA and creating a… a database. What I think the public weren’t as conscious of was the possibility that um in fact it would grow and that um many of our children might end up being on it, or that disproportionately black people are on it at a level that is not reflective of their place in society[sic]. So I mean there are anxieties I think in that if you unpick this that there exist amongst the public.

Sedley: [Explains that to eliminate the database would be to go backwards, and explains that DNA samples kept for acquitted people have later allowed police to catch and convict serial rapists.]

Kennedy: ‘I think the Scots have actually er got a good way of dealing with it, which is to say we keep the DNA even of those who are acquitted but for a limited amount of time, and ah, I think in Scotland it’s something like 6 years. I would be inclined to believe that you should be able to keep it for sexual offences simply because we know more about sexual offences and we know that it’s quite difficult to get convictions in sexual offences often because it’s one person’s word against another. But people who commit sexual offences often repeat, err you know there’s very rarely a one off, they often repeat it and therefore I think it would be worth arguing that ah people who are investigated, and possibly even put on trial for a… sexual offence or acquitted should remain on the database for err six or ten years.’

Sedley [Explains that all visitors to the UK should also have their DNA taken too.]

Kennedy: ‘I think that it’s hard to imagine how you would do it, I mean, other than to say that this is a long term project and every baby that is born would now have its DNA taken at birth and kept, and everybody coming to visit Britain or to stay then is put onto the database but otherwise how would you do it, do we all queue up at police stations and how do you, how do you create a system to do this, you know, and ah it’s not terribly practical…’

* * *

Helena Kennedy has built up quite a reputation as something of a civil libertarian, if not a New Labour dragon slayer—that is to say, a slayer of New Labour dragons. She once described David Blunkett, the former Home Office secretary as ‘“a shameless authoritarian”’, and indeed as one who took ‘”lessons in jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe”’(3). (Blunkett was a champion of the digital ID card, and after a series of scandals forced him to resign not once but twice from government, he became an adviser to Entrust, a US corporation that is reportedly interested in supplying the UK with the technology required for the new digital ID cards[4].)

I would have thought that most UK citizens are in no position, if only for what might be described as ‘national-historical’ reasons, to use Robert Mugabe as a kind of civil liberties bogey. Be that as it may, it does appear that Kennedy has earned a reputation for being, as the title of a Guardian piece suggested in 2004, ‘a radical in the house [of Lords]’. Indeed the same article quotes her as saying that “… you have to look at yourself in the mirror every morning. Someone said to me that you have to swallow stones in government. Well, I do understand that there has to be a degree of compromise in government, but there are some stones that I just won’t swallow.”’(5)

It was thus doubly disappointing to hear that Helena Kennedy has apparently swallowed a very big stone—some might call it a civil liberties boulder—in order to offer what can only be described as a qualified defence of the DNA database. This might seem paradoxical because she was chosen by You and Yours ostensibly to present the views against the universal DNA database. There is, however, no real paradox involved; as I noted in another post, we are living in times of political ‘quasi-ecumenism’, and this means that the mass media regularly stage ‘debates’ between people who might seem to oppose each others’ views, but whose views are framed in such a manner as to directly or indirectly make them seem to support whatever government policy is being debated. While You and Yours may have allowed some listeners with truly critical views to phone in, its introduction, which will have set the scene in more ways than one for the phone-ins that followed, was a textbook example of pseudo-debate.

Why has Helena Kennedy agreed, if indeed she has agreed, to contribute to this dynamic? Presumably Kennedy has thought long and hard about what it means, in constitutional terms, to accept the imposition of a surveillance system that assumes that someone is, or might be guilty ten years after being acquitted by the courts (she proposes that the scheme might be left in place for six or ten years after someone has been acquitted). Presumably she has also thought long and hard about the medium– to long–term implications of the imposition of such a scheme in a society where it is not unknown for the very politicians who promote surveillance systems to then become advisers for the corporations that are keen to make money from the selfsame technologies. In her relatively new-found role as a politician, Kennedy has, finally, presumably also thought long and hard about how far one should go in the direction of what Max Weber once described as an ethics of power or ‘responsibility’—i.e. under what circumstances should one accept the anointments of power, and what are the costs of such anointments from the point of view of combating the creeping Gattacaization of the UK.

* * *

In today’s other post, I refer to what I describe as the ideological dynamic of ‘entre-nous’. You and Yours is a good example of this dynamic, and indeed the intervention in the programme by Tony Lake is a case in point. Lake is the Chair of the National DNA Database, Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police, and the representative on forensic subjects for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Lake and the ACPO have worked hard to maintain an image of impartiality vis-à-vis the DNA database; however, given the quietly exponential growth of the database, we have to assume that the members of ACPO are either keen on the project, or keen to please their current political masters. Whatever the case, at one point in the interview one of the presenters in You and Yours asks Lake if he himself as given up his DNA. This question will almost certainly have been agreed in advance, and Lake does not disappoint: Lake has indeed given up his DNA, so that it ‘should’ be ‘there’ [presumably he refers to the database, but this is by no means clear, and it would be interesting to see this point followed up by the BBC]).

Now if ‘Tony’, who sounds like a very nice man, has given up his DNA, then it must be alright mustn’t it? And if this is so, why shouldn’t you give up you and yours?

References

1) Unfortunately, there is no You and Yours ‘listen again’ archive (beyond a week), so I cannot direct readers back to the programme itself.
2) Note: I could not access the Law in Action programme because it has no ‘listen again’ archive. So there is a very real possibility that Helena Kennedy was rather more critical there than she appeared to be in You and Yours. I certainly know from my own experience that one has little or no control over what happens to a radio interview or to a TV interview, especially when an interview is not broadcast live, and when it is taken apart and recontextualized a posteriori by editors during postproduction.
3) as quoted in GuardianUnlimited, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.
4) See Observer, March 25, 2007, ‘Blunkett is given job at identity card firm’, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2042271,00.html#article_continue, accessed October 9, 2007.
5) GuardianUnlimited, March 27, 2004, ‘A radical in the house’, http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1177977,00.html, accessed October 9, 2007.

Diana, Entre-Nous

Diana died 10 years ago, and as I write these lines she is back in the news: a public inquest has finally begun that will supposedly clarify ‘for once and for all’ the ‘tragic sequence of events’ that led up to her death in 1997. The inquest is premised in this sense on a remarkably disingenuous proposition; even if the conspiracy theories of murder are wrong, they will continue to prosper for that is the way of conspiracy theorists. But if the conspiracy theorists are right, then presumably the inquest will work to continue to cover up the evidence.

This problem to one side, the images that are once again appearing in the newspapers, on TV and on the internet are a reminder of the remarkable expression of popular solidarity that took place immediately after Diana’s death. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of flowers and all manner of memorabilia were deposited in an impromptu memorial in front of Kensington Palace, and even now there is considerable debate about the how’s and why’s of this historical event.

Whatever one’s theory, one thing seems incontrovertibly clear: millions of people responded to Diana as if they had a personal relationship with her, as if they knew her. Of course, millions did have a personal relationship with her (of sorts), and did know her (in a certain way). What is at issue is the way in which a ‘truly’ interpersonal relationship (such as Diana may have had with, say, Charles, or with her friends, or with her children) was invisibly substituted by a mediated relationship. A person who was incredibly remote in a social sense—how many people could ever aspire to Diana’s economic wealth and to her social networks?—nonetheless came to be claimed and treated as being ‘known’ or even as being ‘one of us’ by millions who wept for her as if she were a newly deceased sister, mother, or close friend.

How did this come to be? The ‘as if’ was arguably made possible in no small part by years and years of a relatively recent form of mass mediation. When Elizabeth Windsor was being groomed, the predominant mass media representations worked mostly to maintain the authority of the monarchy by underscoring its social distance. This is evident in the Queen’s manners even today; she clearly has a hard time appearing to be anything other than a remote figure whose stature depends on the judicious maintenance of a certain public distance.

Diana’s ‘revolution’, if we can call it that, involved the cultivation of the opposite stance: despite being every bit as royal as the royals (if not more so), she became, in Tony Blair’s wonderfully accurate and misleading expression, ‘the people’s princess’. This was so (or appeared to be so) thanks in no small part to what Claude Lefort describes as a dynamic of ‘entre-nous’ (between-us). By means of a variety of procedures—informal commentary between media presenters, ‘fly-on-the-wall’ and ‘wall to wall’ coverage of events, but at times simply by ‘being there’—the dominant media produced a sense of proximity, a sense of familiarity which allowed ‘us’, indeed encouraged ‘us’ to feel that ‘we’ were ‘close’ to ‘Diana’.

This dynamic is by no means confined to the representation of Diana. On the contrary, Claude Lefort notes that entre-nous has become a key part of an ideology that underpins the governance of modern societies. As Lefort explains, the media, and we might say media presenters in particular, appear to disseminate an objective knowledge, but even as they do so they ‘assume personal attributes in order to ensure [their] links with those addressed who, in spite of their mass, their separation and their ignorance of each other, will find themselves personally contacted and silently brought together by virtue of their common proximity to the one who speaks. In this sense, the most banal programme is an incantation of familiarity; it installs within mass society the limits of a “little world” where everything happens as if each person were already turned towards the other. It provokes a hallucination of nearness which abolishes a sense of distance, strangeness, imperceptibility, the signs of the outside, of adversity, of otherness’(1).

If it is true that othering is the sine qua non of racism and xenophobia, the elimination, or apparent elimination of social distance, difference or alterity is the obverse side of the same ideological coin. Entre-nous is, in this sense, as much a matter of ideology as is, or was, the older form of presenting the royalty. Indeed if the royals felt threatened by Diana, it was not because she endangered royalism, but because she at once developed, and symbolized a form of royalism which was, and perhaps even today remains anathema to Elizabeth and Philip Windsor.

References

1) from ‘Outline of the Genesis of Ideology in Modern Societies’, in C. Lefort The Political Forms of Modern Society, edited by J.B. Thompson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986, p. 228.

Pluto Plattering (aka Whirlo-Waying)

The origins of Pluto Plattering are open to dispute. One theory has it that the first Pluto Platters were cake tins. Another suggests that they were actually cookie tins. Yet another speaks of pie tins. Whatever the case, there seems to be a consensus that it was college students that threw the tins around.

The ‘around’ in ‘Threw the tins around’ is actually quite precise: the tins did spin, and, if contemporary theories of physics are valid, lift was generated by a combination of gyroscopic effects and what arguably became one of the most traditional of airfoils.

Each of these points requires some elucidation:

The most traditional of airfoils: legend has it that a bakery was established in the late 19th century by one William Russel Frisbie, who named it the Frisbie Pie Company. The company reached the peak of its production of airfoils—well, of airfoilable pie tins, with removable pies inside—in 1956, when 80,000 were distributed in shops in the southeastern corner of New England. The tins became, in effect, pie-less wings flown by the wrists of leisurely college students who yelled ‘Frisbie!’ as a kind of heads-up.

A pie tin may not look very much like a wing, but actually, if you were to cut a pie tin in half and examine it in cross-section—and if, of course, you were to know something about the physics of winging—you might well see a family resemblance between a pie tin and the wing of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The 787 is not quite a flying pie tin, even if this aircraft’s passengers might one day feel a ‘family resemblance’ with the contents of pie tins. Such differences (or similarities) to one side, the 787, like those Frisbie Pie Company tins, flies thanks in no small part to the fact that the different forms or directions of drag on the wing are such that there is far less horizontal resistance than there is vertical resistance to the air. The shapes of tin and wing are similar in that both allow their respective objects to move more easily in a horizontal than they do in a vertical direction.

Gyroscopic effects: one might be tempted leave the physics of Pluto Plattering there. But to do so would be to miss a key dimension of the flying success of the Pluto Platter. Unlike a 787, let alone an Airbus A380, a pie tin can be grabbed, and thrown with a marvellous ‘gyroscopic’ effect. In the manner of a spinning top, the pie tin’s spinning, or rather its angular momentum, has the effect of stabilizing the tin and preventing it from tilting (unless, of course, it is thrown ‘with a tilt’ in which case the same effect works to preserve that tilt). This is because an angular force spreads the mass of the pie tin away from its centre of mass at a 90 degree angle to the axis of its rotation.

This being so, the best way not to throw a pie tin (or a cookie or cake tin) is to do so as you would a ball. No, you must give that pie tin a good flip to ensure that it spins. Indeed, were it not for the combination of airfoil-ability + gyroscopic effects, throwing a Pluto Platter would be almost as unremarkable (tantrums to one side) as throwing around pans, forks, spatulas, or rolling pins.

So the pie tin had its own peculiar way of flying, and indeed if you had grabbed a Frisbie Pie Tin by the rim, if you had rotated your body slightly to the right (or to the left if you were to be so unfortunate as to be right-handed), and if you had then flung arm, wrist, hand, tin and soul into the ether, then something seemingly miraculous would have happened: the platter would have straightened out into a trajectory that, in the manner of an object not unlike a wingless top, would have maintained a marvelously angular momentum until it was vanquished by the forces of anti-levity—or indeed by the brutal catch of another wristed hand.

I refer in this way to the other marvel that is Pluto Plattering. Then as now, a Pluto Platter is flung so that someone else might be given the opportunity to enjoy the platter’s trajectory, and so that s/he might plan, without planning, to interrupt that trajectory with the most distal of the own extremities.

* * *

I’ve been so keen to explain the early history and physics of Pluto Plattering that I’ve neglected to explain how it was that flying pie tins became ‘Pluto Platters’.

Actually, before they were given this name, they had another name: ‘flyin saucers’. Both names reflect the Cold War passion for UFOs and the exploration of space. And indeed the inventor of the Pluto Platter—if we can say that any such device ever had just one inventor—sought to cash in on the twin crazes. The man in question was and remains one Walter Frederick Morrison, a WWII fighter-bomber pilot who was shot down over Italy and spent some time in the infamous Stalag 13.

Morrison apparently began by experimenting not with pie tins, or even cake pans (which he did later use) but with the lids of popcorn cans. After the war, and armed with his knowledge of aeronautics and the limitations of popcorn lids, Morrison played a key role in the development of the science of Pluto Plattering. In 1946 he reportedly sketched a new design for a device which he named the Whirlo-Way—perhaps the best name ever given to Pluto Platters. But the real breakthrough came about when he got an investor to provide the finance for what was to be a truly revolutionary ‘pie tin’: one that would break, for once and for all, the hitherto indissoluble link between the culinary and the whirling arts. The new tin would stop being a tin by virtue of being manufactured with an extra-ordinary substance that came to be called ‘plastic‘.

* * *

Today plastic may be reviled in more ways than one. But plastic was not always regarded as an evil, disposable substance. We have only to revisit Roland Barthes’ wonderful little essay ‘Plastic’ to get a sense of how much opinions have changed since 1957, the date when the original French version of the essay was published, and two years after the first Pluto Platters were cast:

‘Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter. An ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.

So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible. And it is this, in fact, which makes it a miraculous substance: a miracle is always a sudden transformation of nature. Plastic remains impregnated throughout with this wonder: it is less a thing than the trace of a movement.

And as the movement here is almost infinite, transforming the original crystals into a multitude of more and more startling objects, plastic is, all told, a spectacle to be deciphered: the very spectacle of its end-products. At the sight of each terminal form (suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or paper), the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma. This is because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets as well as jewels. Hence a perpetual amazement, the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter, and the connections he detects between the singular of the origin and plural of the effects. And this amazement is a pleasurable one, since the scope of the transformations gives man the measure of his power, and since the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through Nature.’(1)

* * *

We find in Barthes’ writing the elements for a semiotics of whirlo-waying in its infancy. If plastic was a matter of perpetual amazement, if the quick-change artistry of plastic transformations gave men (and presumably women too) the pleasure of the measure of their power, let alone the euphoria of a free-wheeling movement through Nature, then the physics of the Pluto Platter combined this symbolic-material substrate with its flying equivalent to produce what was quite literally a revolutionary effect. Each time a Pluto Platter was thrown, we might say that a transformation was transformed again (and again and again). The Pluto Platter became, in this sense, the most modern of flying pie tins.

Better yet, and perhaps heralding what would in future become a world of all too disposable plastic, this modernity could be achieved simply by casting away—perhaps one should say casting a-side—an object that thereby acquired a life of levity in the sense of levitation, or in the sense of the etymological origin of both words (levitas, levis, light, or the lightness of being).

Of course, the Pluto Platters were not cast into the ether for their own sake, though one can well imagine that this happened quite frequently in the early days. No, the platters were whirled into that angular momentum for the benefit of co-Pluto-Platerees or co-Whirlo-Wayees. In this mutual dialectic of casting-something-a-side-to-experience-a-flight-of-equilibrium we find perhaps a foretaste of the (itself mythologised) ‘spirit of the 60s’. Unfortunately, we also find a kind of anti-model, a perfect inversion of what some might well regard as today’s ‘spirit’: in 2007 we are all invited to perform the opposite (bankers might say apposite) transformation: to give up literally and metaphorically on revolutionary flights in order to become plastic objects, or the objects of plastic.

Perhaps we need to do more Whirlo-Waying.

References

Note: the historical and physical information has been drawn from several websites. See for example http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa980218.htm, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisbee.

1) Quote from ‘Plastic’, in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972, pp. 97-98.