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Terminal beach: the concept of national identity can be seen as a consensual illusion used to bind disparate entities into a whole that is as vague and problematic as it is unified.

Article Excerpt
A short history of our nation's political life over the last twenty-four months would quickly give the lie to the Blairite doctrine that today we live in a post-ideological age, where all that is left to do is ensure 'responsible' financial management. Events too well known to need recounting by me in detail, both internationally and 'at home', have rather forced the question of national identity to the forefront of our public life. The arrival of the Tampa, our government's 'Pacific solution' to the refugee issue, the finding of Australia's treatment of asylum seekers in the camps to be against UN human rights standards, the September 11 attacks on the US and the Bali bombings, and now the PM's unshaking solidarity with the US: all these events have shown how the soul of the contemporary Australian subject is being fought for by what we could, after the sociologist Max Weber, call 'competing Gods'. Even leaving behind the Republican debate, and the vexed issue of our relation to our colonial inheritance, Australia's identity as a nation in the Asia-Pacific region seems more than ever in question, given the apparent enthusiasm with which the Howard Government has embraced the role of a kind of regional commander in the US's bid to attain unprecedented global leadership. Differently, current political and economic discussion is full of references to economic globalisation as a kind of natural fact, while at the level of social policy the Howard Government here as elsewhere closely resembling the 'New Labour' government of Tony Blair seems enamoured of values and models of family life that belong to a period of our nation's social history that has long been superseded. At an individual level, the omnipresent flood of advertising, combined with new management spiel, encourages us to think of ourselves as individually, socially and professionally mobile individuals without lasting commitment to just about anything, even as the US and Australian executives try to galvanise support by reference to the 'homeland' or to 'our way of life'.

What I want to do in this essay, then, is to pose at the most basic level the vexed question of our national identity: what it is, where it might come from, and how it might have come to be constructed. However, I want to proceed by a detour--a recent film, Dark City, drawing illustratively upon what its analysis reveals in order to cast light upon our political questions and situation.

Of Dark City and 'Shell Beach'

In Dark City--an explicitly philosophical film--an ancient, dying civilisation of creatures from an alien planet has become interested in these questions of how we humans come to construct a sense of self. The 'strangers' have only collective memories, and each of them as an individual seems to lack whatever it is that makes humans unique. In telling recognition of this fact, each of their names is the name of an object: Mr Hand, Mr Book and so on. As if in exchange, though, they have a capacity definitively debarred to us human beings. This is the capacity to change physical reality through acts of will alone, an activity that they call 'tuning'.

In order to conduct their researches into the enigma of human identity, the strangers have used their tuning capabilities to set up what is, as we finally discover, a very large lab. This lab is...

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