The Mother's Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays 1783488174, 9781783488179

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The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays

Place, Memory, Affect Series Editors: Neil Campbell, Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby and Christine Berberich, School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies at the University of Portsmouth. The Place, Memory, Affect series seeks to extend and deepen debates around the intersections of place, memory, and affect in innovative and challenging ways. The series will forge an agenda for new approaches to the edgy relations of people and place within the transnational global cultures of the twenty-first century and beyond. Walking Inside Out, edited by Tina Richardson The Last Isle: Contemporary Taiwan Film, Culture, and Trauma, by Sheng-mei Ma Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-Unified Germany After 1989, by Ben Gook Affective Critical Regionality, by Neil Campbell (forthcoming) Visual Arts Practice and Affected, edited by Ann Schilo (forthcoming) Haunted Landscapes, edited by Ruth Heholt and Niamh Downing (forthcoming) In the Ruins of the Cold War Bunker, edited by Luke Bennett (forthcoming)

The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays

Stephen Muecke

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Muecke All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 9781783488155 PB 9781783488162 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 978-1-78348-815-5 (cloth: alk. paper) 978-1-78348-816-2 (paper: alk. paper) 978-1-78348-817-9 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

For Bruno Latour

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

What is Fictocriticism?

xi

Part I: Indigenous Australia1 1 Don McLeod’s Law: The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike3 2 The Mother’s Day Protest13 3 The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs

27

4 Can You Argue with the Honeysuckle?

39

Part II: After Critique

45

5 Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement

47

6 Reproductive Aesthetics: Multiple Realities in a Seamus Heaney Poem

63

7 An Experiment with Truth and Beauty in Cultural Studies

77

Part III: Speculative Histories

85

8 A Diplomat for the History Wars 

87

9 A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things

93

10 Speculating with History: The Wreck of the Sydney Cove

vii

103

viii Contents

Part IV: Ecologies of Place

111

11 The Composition and Decomposition of Commodities: The Colonial Careers of Coal and Ivory

113

12 I Had a Dream in Tropical Islands Resort in Berlin. Was It Real?

125

13 Berlin Babylon

131

14 Picture That Cyclone

141

Index153

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Hamish Morgan who helped with research on Don McLeod; Baylee Brits and Jan Idle helped with editing and proof-reading. Meaghan Morris provided crucial encouragement; Noel King, Susie Pratt, Katrina Schlunke and John Frow provided useful references; Prudence Black responded to the manuscript with her usual enthusiasm; Janice Roe and Margie Cox helped out on the Lurujarri Trail; Bruno Latour offered engagement on his AIME project; Lauren Berlant invited me to the ‘Worlding, Writing’ roundtable on making new genres in Chicago; Ilaria Vanni suggested fieldwork at Tropical Islands Resort, and in Berlin, Russ West-Pavlov, Jens Elze and Dennis Mischke were most generous with their support and friendship. The team at Rowman and Littlefield was able to make the publishing process a real pleasure. Thank you. This work was at times assisted by funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Projects: DP0877459 ‘Intercolonial Networks of the Indian Ocean’; DP140101459 ‘Goolarabooloo Culture of the Western Kimberley’ and DP1301104571, ‘Towards the Experimental Humanities’. Earlier versions of most of these texts have appeared: ‘Don McLeod’s Law: The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike,’ in R. WestPavlov and J. Wawrzinek, eds. Frontier Skirmishes: Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992. Heidelberg: Universität Winter, 2010, pp. 71–79; ‘The Great Tradition: Translating Durrudiya’s Songs,’ in Beate Neumeier and Kay Schaffer, eds. Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia, Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam) Cross-culture Studies series, 2013, pp. 23–36; ‘Can you Argue with the Honeysuckle?’ Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Space, ed. J. Rutherford and B. Holloway. Perth UWA Press, pp. 34–42, 2010; ‘Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement,’ Cultural Studies Review, vol. 18, no. 1, March 2012, ix

x Acknowledgements

pp. 39–57; ‘Reproductive Aesthetics: Multiple Realities in a Seamus Heaney Poem,’ in Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind, Eds. Chris Danta and Helen Groth, NY and London, Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 161–72; ‘An experiment with truth and beauty in cultural studies,’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 453–57, 2013; ‘A Diplomat for the History Wars,’ TEXT, April 2015; ‘Speculating with History: The Wreck of the Sydney Cove,’ Wasafiri: International Contemporary Writing, vol. 26, no. 2, 2011, pp. 37–40; ‘A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook: Thinking History through Things,’ Cultural Studies Review, March 2008, pp. 33–42; ‘The composition and decomposition of commodities: the colonial careers of coal and ivory,’ TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Programs, vol. 20, 2013; ‘Berlin Babylon,’ in Nunan, D. and J. Choi (eds.) Language and Culture: Reflective Narratives and the Emergence of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 155–63; ‘I Had a Dream in Tropical Islands Resort in Berlin. Was it Real?’ Performance Paradigm, 6 June 2010.

What Is Fictocriticism?

Or rather, what can fictocriticism do? Because I think we are dealing less with existential issues here, questions of identifying, and more with courses of action that accompany what we do when we write: scratching on paper, or tapping on keyboards. There is, obviously, a huge amount of writing around, and it can have very diverse functions, oscillating between informing and entertaining or pleasure and pain. Look, for example, at a really painful genre, the policy document. Typically produced by large organisations, such documents are not only excessively long, but are (according to my friend Tess Lea) ‘designed not to be read . . . replete with such arcane and mind-numbing sentences, such excessive minutiae, that they actively repel close attention. Recoiled, analysis goes somewhere else.’1 A waste of paper, you might say. An Environmental Assessment report, 750 pages long and tabled for public comment two days before the bulldozers are due to go in. It makes you wish for a rhetoric to cut through the rhetoric,2 those maverick Hollywood moments when ‘due process’ gets bogged down and our hero does something decisive, articulate (and pretty-much illegal) to achieve a just outcome. So the story goes. But yes, the policy document is rhetoric. It is a rhetoric that blocks a course of action even as it pretends to be a course of action, just by being brick-like and ‘unreadable’. Inside Kafka’s castle there can be no performances; dust is the only audience. Can policy be written fictocritically? No doubt, if it can be taught to dance and get the blood pumping in the veins of the bureaucrats. We have nothing against bureaucrats! We just want their policy to ‘get through’, that is, to circulate not only within the castle, but to be taken outside and tested against a new public that might reasonably ask why, exactly, should they have to do what the state is demanding?

xi

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What Is Fictocriticism?

Within the field of archaeology Denis Byrne created something of a new branch with his book, Surface Collection, where he recasts his discipline, with Proustian sensitivity, in South-East Asia.3 It is what Alphonso Lingis does with philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche are ‘tested’ by his extensive travel experiences and then performed in his writing4; it is what Greg Dening and Katrina Schlunke do with history5; what Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart do with anthropology,6 what Bruno Latour does with Science and Technology Studies.7 We could even argue that the turn to fictocriticism happens when a lawyer pleads a case by sticking ‘strictly’ to the letter of the law, while cleverly elaborating quite a new argument that the law has never seen before. Or when a theoretical physicist can explain difficult theory so lucidly that it finds a broad popular readership. The ficto- side of fictocriticism follows the twists and turns of animated language as it finds new pathways. The -criticism part comes in the risky leap of taking the story to a different ‘world’. Let’s look at some examples in a bit more detail, where innovative writers in particular disciplines take the risk of exposing that discipline to scrutiny by another public. This has nothing to do with removing the shackles from the original discipline. The writing retains some of the old rules, but as it ‘re-boots’, it is constrained by some new ones.8 Disciplines with pretensions to mastery might take this as an invitation to colonise another domain, or at least to pronounce upon it from some superior vantage point. Philosophy, in particular, often sounds like it is claiming to be the über-discipline. Or it can happen when ‘psychologists explain’ ritual behaviour in church, as if religion and theology had no autonomy and dignity of their own. Or more pointedly, when anyone armed with the easily acquired weapons of critique can denounce appearances of sexism, racism, oppression of any sort, in the name of . . . what? An overarching theory of everything?9 Needless to say, the political arts of fictocriticism would never be so ham-fisted. They claim to be experimental, in the sense specified by Kathleen Stewart at the start of her wonderful book, Ordinary Affects: Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgment. Committed not to demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world but to speculation, curiosity and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation. A something both animated and inhabitable.10

The innovation that Denis Byrne brings to archaeology illustrates the coupling of political urgency with new techniques. Unable to find material evidence in Bali for the massacres of communists in the 1960s, he has to



What Is Fictocriticism?

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try digging elsewhere, this time down the layers of affect, including his own feelings as he wrestles with ‘a state of mild paranoia’, plus ‘somberness’ and ‘outrage’ that ‘the same regime that has orchestrated the killings was still in power’.11 Then he brings in the archival and scholarly layers, but more importantly (and riskily) a personal narrative that follows the connections among these affective and technological agencies, as in: It was steamy and my motivation to go on was ebbing away. I examined the Nelles 1:1,000,000 map of Bali, trying to read more into it that was there to be read, the way one does with maps of that scale. Daniel lit an Ardath Mild and threw the match out of the window. ‘It’s like looking for a needle in a sack,’ he said. ‘If you want my opinion, we’re never going to find this place,’ he continued, gazing out across the countryside.12

‘Ardath Mild’ is so poignantly perfect for this context that had Daniel been smoking Marlboro Red, the writer would have to change his brand. Why? Because the passage, in its larger context, illustrates what anthropologist Mick Taussig calls ‘the mastery of non-mastery’.13 As Byrne elaborates a new archaeology of affect in a skilled, professional and scholarly manner, he refuses to make himself the authority of his own achievement. To do what Byrne does, you need to connect the Ardath Mild to the Nelles map to the genre of the investigative quest to theories of archaeology; and the narrative form carrying all this enables him to tell how he came to know, rather than display what he knows, which is something of a principle for fictocriticism. By the way, if you have seen Oppenheimer’s 2013 documentary The Act of Killing, dealing with the same events in Indonesian history, you might also wonder if there is something about the material that causes him, also, to blow up the conventional realist expectations of the documentary film genre. You need fictocriticism to do what Bryne does? Certainly, and Ross Gibson helps me say why, as he explains how the work of speculative realism he wrote based on the slender archive left by the first astronomer at Sydney, William Dawes, could not have taken the form of a novel, such as the two written by Jane Rogers and Kate Grenville: Reading them, I cannot shake the conviction that a well-made novel must obscure some of the most puzzling and provocative elements in the notebooks. This is because a novelist typically deploys a long narrative arc to bring characters into vivid focus, encouraging the reader to appreciate every persona as an entity: well-drawn, complete and singular in a storyline that is lured along by intrigue and reward as the tale drives towards resolution. While a novel can be a marvel in the way it might encourage its readers to empathise with distinctive characters, this special affordance of the form can block other aspects of

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What Is Fictocriticism?

existence that are worth knowing too, crucial aspects such as conundrum and incomprehensibility as well as character-traits such as indeterminacy, multiplicity and mutability.14

This reminds me of something I wrote years ago, grasping for what I called ‘a poetry of a different sort, one that responds to our times . . . a poetry of fragmentation, contradiction, unanswered questions, specificity, fluidity and change’.15 So, fictocriticism might find the ‘long narrative arc’ impossible as it stumbles over obstacles and then finds relief with what the fragment affords, as some of the ancestors of the genre—Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes— often did, as they too refused mastery. Thinking of Proust, Benjamin wrote, ‘The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called upon us, but we, the masters, were not home.’16 Thus, Michael Taussig leaves home and risks his life crossing the border from Turkey into Kobane in Kurdistan to witness the defence of that city by an army of Kurdish women. He writes in numbered fragments, nine in all, as if like a piece of jazz he has to snake around and attack his themes from a different direction each time in order to dislodge a shard of meaning before it crumbles, like the walls of this city that ISIS is bent on destroying. And he has to get the tone just right, in order to master that non-mastery, especially since his material is talking to him with a politics that is anti-State: ‘Sometimes words fail you. Names are not enough. Anarchist? Feminist? You have to be kidding!’ Someone once said that reading Taussig is like having him right there with you, looking over your shoulder. An intimate tone in a minor key, or a critical proximity, as opposed to critical distance. Many of the chapters in this book will try to ‘perform’ such critical proximity, which is a way of paying respect to the extraordinary ability we humans have for discrimination when it comes to tone. When Bruno Latour writes of the way lovers talk to each other, he asks, ‘Are we not ready to give anything and everything to be able to detect truth from falsity in this strange talk’?17 If there is a hint of insincerity in the vows of love, it will be heard or felt, and everything that went into making two people intimate will collapse, and closeness will give way to a yawning insurmountable distance. Lovers’ talk, like literature, manufactures subjectivities. Are we saying this is more important than the informational content of speech? Engineers will be unconvinced, and so they should, if they want their language to be precise and informational (but practising language in that way maintains them as kinds of people: engineers). So yes, informational content is important in language use, but there are all sorts of subtleties (and entanglements—it is hard to claim that engineering is ‘pure’) that remain to be explored and that have a direct bearing on our ways of being and becoming.



What Is Fictocriticism?

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One of the reasons many of the chapters in this book are in conversation with Indigenous Australia is that encounters with alterity can be like engines for the production of concepts. I need hardly add that the contemporary anthropological task is neither cannibalistic (consuming the other to feed the discipline) nor narcissistically about reflections on ‘the West’s’ own thought. If one is to avoid such reductions, then the mediating text will have to participate in the strange business of recognising and nurturing the compelling weirdness of events, worlds, modes of being where there is no common ground where we can relax and say we share this much at least. Eliminating Nature and ‘Human nature’, as we shall see, opens up anthropology and cultural studies to the richness of multiple ontologies. Concepts are geophilosophical, they come from somewhere and begin their travels, assisted along the way by the attention given by other concepts and feelings. Dennis Mischke reminds me that postcolonial studies risks being a desert of concepts if there are not also percepts standing out and asserting an aesthetic mode of existence that can persist otherwise. And he eloquently defends the capacity of fictocriticism to do this.18 Concept and percept, fact and fiction, coexist in the fictocritical text. It is a text whose dynamic tries to latch onto a momentum,19 rather than oscillating between such ‘dialectical’ poles. One way of dismantling and reassembling the architecture of thought that allows for the oppositions of subject and object, interior and exterior, self and world is to abandon the ‘freeze-frame’ as a technology of capture. It has a long history that has been analysed in detail with reference to the traditions of the still life, the perspectival painting, the landscape. ‘What western painting has invented’, says Latour, ‘is a couple whose two members are equally bizarre, if not exotic, and of which there exists no trace in any other civilization: the object for this subject; the subject for this object.’20 Far from being a natural state of affairs, it represents an effort of redistribution. With these modes of representation, Europeans are working hard to put Nature over there, as they invent a kind of subjectivity over here. And there are good reasons for doing this, for instance to do with property and exploitability, as John Berger showed years ago with his analysis of Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews: a landscape and its aristocrats pictured for each other.21 My Aboriginal friends, for good reason, resist adopting a Western concept of singular Nature ‘out there’, because they see their being intimately and inalienably bound up with other beings that are not ‘in it’, but moving along with them in their ‘living country’. Perhaps we should strap on a ‘GoPro’ as a visual metaphor for a more lively, intimate and dynamic set of relations? This academic game is a serious one, right? Can it accommodate adventures with GoPros on skateboards or scuba diving among tropical fish on the Great Barrier Reef? Or lightness, joking and laughter, except as objects

xvi

What Is Fictocriticism?

of study, rendered serious, as if that whole affective side of what makes the professional life bearable has to be surgically removed in painful exercises in self-abnegation? Dennis Mischke defends fictocritical joking as its way of circumventing ‘the always problematic thinking in temporal dimensions of achievement, development or advancement’22—what might also be called defaulting to ‘alpha (male) thinking’, where the strong keep getting away with beating others with the one weapon, as if all other ruses and techniques have been forgotten. Alphonso Lingis illustrates this beautifully in a piece called ‘Blessings and Curses’: In a social gathering, you find yourself exposed to a caustic or demeaning remark cast your way. Had you been strong in social skills, you would have met the blow with a repartee that would have ended in laughter. Had you been very strong, you would have surprised the aggressor with a put-down so witty he would have found himself unable not to laugh at himself. But you could only mumble something witless, and the fencer turned away to a worthier opponent. You feel wounded, mortified. The blow was delivered and the aggressor turned away; the feeling does not pass. You find yourself unable to be fully present to the sallies and rebounds of the crackling banter around you. Back in your room, unable to sleep, you go over the wound, probing it, feeling it, verifying the pain.23

‘Social skills,’ in this case repartee or wit, is what is lacking and leads to the kind of festering resentment that characterises some of the so-called ‘beta males’ who end up picking up a semi-automatic weapon and taking revenge on the schoolmates who rejected them. Perhaps they were never given strong examples of how to deflect aggression through laughter, or how to multiply ways of being in the world by getting the feel for the affective affordances that language can offer. So, it is by telling a funny story that Katrina Schlunke effectively negotiates the pleasure and pain of writing history of/in the country town she came from: ‘I don’t think it helped to go back as a lesbian,’ she says, as she is also ‘caught in the act of becoming postcolonial’. And then her writing itself enacts ‘a queer odyssey’, with ‘emotional maelstroms’ and I would like to quote it at greater length to illustrate the necessary twists and turns of a history writing in-the-making, rather than a writing-as-product: You can barely touch your girlfriend in anything like a semi-public place but long to experience the most sensational passions, hidden behind shearing sheds, in anonymous motels further along the highway, on walks along struggling rivers, because they re-awaken your desire for revenge, for something that has become the Big Secret that gives you energy to live in a place like this.



What Is Fictocriticism?

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You don’t want them to know, you want them to be like you. You long for them to speak your language, which of course some of them do, some of the time. Home is a safety net with holes. You begin to live in an odd world of recognition and mis-recognition. The laugh that you have when you go into the fish-and-chip shop wearing your ‘I can’t even THINK straight’ T-shirt and the middle-aged, over-worked woman behind the counter saying, ‘Oh I know exactly how you feel love.’24

And she goes on, of course, to talk of serious things like massacres of Aboriginal Australians, repressed for so long by mainstream history that the issues involved can no longer be bound up within one discipline, but are deeply connected to psychic trauma on a national scale and with political expediency at other levels. These are some of the things that fictocritical writing can do. What it is, exactly, remains to be seen.

Notes 1. Tess Lea, ‘“From Little Things Big Things Grow”—The Unfurling of Wild Policy,’ E-Flux Journal: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/‘from-little-things-bigthings-grow’-the-unfurling-of-wild-policy/. 2. ‘Performative contradiction’ is constitutive of the fictocritical mode, as argued by Dennis Mischke, ‘Othering Otherness: Stephen Muecke’s Fictocriticism and the Cosmopolitan Vision,’ in Jana Gohrisch and Ellen Grünkemeier, eds. Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 332–33. 3. Denis Byrne, Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia (Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2007). 4. Numerous books by Alphonso Lingis, starting with Excesses: Eros and Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1984). 5. Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Katrina Schlunke, Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre (Perth: Curtin University & Fremantle Arts Centre, 2005). 6. An especially adventurous Michael Taussig book is Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997); Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1996). 7. Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), a work of philosophical anthropology, uses the simple device of a fictional character conducting the inquiry. 8. Stephen Muecke, ‘“Rebooting”: An Eco-Pedagogy,’ Environmental Humanities, http://environmentalhumanities.org/about/conversation/. 9. Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,’ Critical Inquiry 30 (2004). 10. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1.

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11. Byrne, 84. 12. Byrne, 90. 13. Michael Taussig, ‘The Mastery of Non-Mastery,’ Public Seminar, Posted August 7, 2015, http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/08/the-mastery-of-non-mastery/#.ViRk8bRNNGw. 14. Ross Gibson, 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 (Perth: University of WA Press, 2013), 17. 15. Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), 11. 16. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 211–12. This passage was quoted as an epigraph to Paul Magee’s wonderful ethno-history, From Here to Tierra del Fuego (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 17. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 103. 18. Mischke, 328–29. 19. Stephen Muecke, ‘Momentum,’ in Joe in the Andamans and Other Fictocritical Stories (Sydney: Local Consumption Publications, 2008). 20. Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences
sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), 27–28. My translation, Latour’s emphasis. 21. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 106–08. 22. Mischke, 331. 23. Alphonso Lingis, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 76–77. 24. K. M. Schlunke, An Autobiography of the Bluff Rock Massacre, PhD University of Western Sydney, 1999, 15. Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre (Perth: Curtin University & Fremantle Arts Centre, 2005).

Part I

Indigenous Australia

There is no way of knowing that is not situated, so I’d like to begin at home, and in the past, in the vast Western Desert of Australia’s outback. This is where it all began for me. Or at least I had to meet Bruce McGuiness first, the Koori activist, at a party in Melbourne in about 1970. We met at the African Students’ Club, and he told me a few hard truths. The move to WA in 1974 brought an even greater awareness of Aboriginal Australia, and I have written elsewhere about my friend Gloria Brennan, who taught me so much, and introduced me to so many people: Helen Corbett, Bobby Randall, Kate and Daisy George, Charlie Perkins, John Newfong.1 She had a portrait of Don McLeod over her mantelpiece and treated him as some kind of hero. What would have happened if I’d taken her advice and dropped in to see him at Strelley on one of those early trips North? He probably wouldn’t have had any time for me. By the time I got to write about him, he was long gone. Let that be a lesson: the history-makers are closer to hand than you think! ‘The Mother’s Day Protest’ skips to the present, the very latest work I’ve been doing with the Goolarabooloo mob in Broome. I wrote ‘The Great Tradition’ after being surprised, once again, how shallow – in a temporal sense – the field they call Australian Literature is. There is an urgent task, and I wish more scholars could be trained to carry it out, to record and translate more of that huge corpus of songs and stories that risks disappearing along with the many beautiful traditional languages of the Australian continent. Finally, in this first section, is my homage to the work of Strehlow, in particular his 1947 classic Aranda Traditions. It is also an homage to my father, Douglas, who was acquainted with Strehlow at the University of Adelaide about the same time Don McLeod’s mob was going on strike. 1

2

Part I

Note 1. Stephen Muecke, No Road (Bitumen All the Way), (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997).

Chapter 1

Don McLeod’s Law The Genesis of the Aboriginal Concept of the Strike

This chapter is an experiment in the geography of the concept. It looks at an episode in the history of the concept of the strike in Western Australia. Rather than treat the concept as an inhabitant of the mind, it is treated materially as a part of a cultural geography. We might find, for example, were we to analyse distribution in terms of spatial lexicography, that epistemology is fairly thickly discussed in urban Europe, but scarcely at all, perhaps never, in the remote parts of Australia. There, by way of contrast, people talk about tjukurpa [Dreaming] all the time. There is no doubt that concepts travel, in real time and space, and confront each other sometimes in violent ways; at other times they sail right past each other because no one has made an attempt to do the hard work of translating a concept like epistemology into tjukurpa, or vice versa, if indeed that is an appropriate thing to do. This chapter will try to set up a method, as material as possible, for the analysis of the migration and translation of concepts into Australia along scientific or philosophical ‘trade routes’ without the assumption that they have a free passage into a kind of conceptual terra nullius. Their movement has to be earned. And Aboriginal people are encouraging or resisting, doing their own conceptual work (the controversial dreamtime, as translation of tjukurpa, bugarrigarra, etc. has certainly taken root, and ‘works’ in some contexts); at other times they use the ‘tools of the master’ (justice, liberation, resistance), with culturally specific ways of putting such concepts into practice, as we shall see with the strike. When in a recent book I asked why there was no such thing as Aboriginal Philosophy,1 the question was a provocation coming, in the wake of Foucauldian thought, from the idea that a given terrain can be traversed by different discursive formations, none of which fill that terrain completely. So, if perceptions and knowledge of and about Indigenous peoples seem 3

4

Chapter 1

confined to anthropology, history and literature (and not to philosophy), then these are rare, perhaps wonderful, things. Rare and limited: we have to specify the cultural and historical limitations and realise that these define the whitefella ways of knowing, because there are no reliable concepts crossing the frontier into the blackfella discursive formations.2 So from here emerges an operative principle close to the concerns of ethnography: see how the concept establishes its local authority. Just because it seems to be universal, it does not mean it will ‘stick’ in a local context. One could, for instance, look at a concept like humanity, seemingly universal, and then find that it has an extremely limited local distribution in many places. So it is not for me to say if there is or not such a thing as ‘aboriginal philosophy’; it will be up to someone qualified (in aboriginality or philosophy) to carry ‘such a concept’ or set of concepts across cultural frontiers and do what they will with it. I didn’t define the concept just now, and I didn’t say which way it might travel, but there is no doubt that this kind of conceptual inquiry belongs as much to ‘the field’ as the seminar room. It is territorially circumscribed, it engages with real localities, languages and communities. This, then, to put a label on it, would be a radical kind of ethno-philosophy, radical (from the roots) because it can’t find those reliable concepts that enable thought easily to cross frontiers. Can we assume, for a moment, that a version of traditional anthropology would have built up a kind of conceptual base, like the base of a monument, that would at least have had human, society (and other concepts like sex, marriage, rites of passage) as reasonably mobile concepts? But for me these are already way too loaded, heavy and hard to move around. They have their origins in the universalising European modernism born of Enlightenment enthusiasms. This modernism has now finally come up against postcolonial thought and found itself ‘provincialised’3 in the context of a new pluralised sense of world modernities; and it has also found itself provincialised, as it were, from within, via the critique of Bruno Latour, who suggests that European modernity should be ‘recalled’ like a defective industrial product.4 Yarning I want to now tell the story of Don McLeod, borrowing something of the style of the bush yarn that I picked up in Western Australia and want to put that into writing here so that the sense of locality is preserved as style. It is, as I suggested above, in tune with a principle of cultural reproduction, so that the concept can be seen to move around with a supportive and specifically local cultural style.5



Don McLeod’s Law

5

They say Donald William McLeod was the first white kid born in Meekatharra in Western Australia, in 1908. Meeka is way out in the desert, if you haven’t been there, on that track heading north from the Kalgoorlie goldfields. It would take you two days to drive there from Kalgoorlie, and Kalgoorlie is a long day’s drive from Perth, and Perth, they say, is the most isolated city in the world. But you wouldn’t be thinking like that if you were born in Meeka, and even less so if you were a local blackfella born there, born in the heart of your own country. You’d think ideas would take a while to get around, on those long dusty roads, some of them so straight that they get names like the Gunbarrel Highway. People are talking to each other, they have a yarn about the state of the world, and they might say, well, here’s a thought, maybe we can do something with this. I am fascinated with the thought of sparseness, where words and concepts are so spread out that they become as valuable as gold nuggets, along with the laconicism of the Australian characters that inhabit this sparse landscape. So few words seem to be exchanged that they can regain a lost gravity; you can almost heft them in your hand. Out there you measure your words because you are a long way from the garrulousness of the city; maybe you have the time to think a bit more before speaking. So, this is my question: Was the philosophy of the ‘fair go’ already in the Western Desert among the Nganyatjarra and other mobs, or did whitefellas like the McLeods bring it with them and spread it around? This philosophy, as simple as it was, and based on direct experience, then translated into action, helped create something that people came later to call ‘Don McLeod’s Law’,6 which was what they called this thing that lay as precious as gold at the heart of the first great Aboriginal labourers’ strike action, in that Pilbara country in the 1940s. On May 1 – Labour Day – 1946, eight hundred Aboriginal pastoral workers from twenty-seven stations in Western Australia walked off the job for better pay and conditions. This was the first industrial action by Indigenous Australians and people think it sowed the seeds for the famous Wave Hill strike among the Gurinji, in the Northern Territory, twenty years later.7 The Pilbara strike lasted until 1949, making it the longest strike in Australia’s history. My discussion here relates to a parallel historical debate in the work of the Subaltern Studies group which asks if subaltern groups like Indian peasants (or Australian Aborigines) engaged in revolt, did they come to political consciousness via the agency of some whitefella ‘giving’ them a concept like the exchange value of labour or resistance. In other words, do they have to be coaxed out of some pre-political stage as Hobsbawm would have it, or did they in fact ‘read [the] contemporary world correctly’, which is the position that the Subaltern Studies school worked to develop on the basis of evidence.8

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Don’s father was a bush mechanic, and apparently he used to tell his son, ‘Treat everyone as an equal; do the right thing to others and they’ll do likewise. Don’t put flowers on a bloke’s grave – help him out now.’9 Now in a frontier town like Meekatharra in early twentieth-century Australia, ‘everyone’ for the whitefellas would have meant themselves, the handful of whitefellas, not the blackfellas living in town or out in the bush. But the McLeods extended humanity to literally everyone, and in this, they were highly unusual, in fact downright treacherous from the point of view of that white mob, because, with the status of being treated like a fellow human being, certain rights of equality tend inevitably to follow. According to a newspaper story written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the strike and interviewing McLeod three years before his death, it was senior law men from the desert and the Pilbara who approached the young McLeod in 1937 with two questions: ‘Why is this no longer our country, and, why can’t we move around without being arrested?’ ‘I don’t know why they asked me,’ McLeod said. ‘Some said I’d taken an old fellow to hospital when no one else would, but I can’t remember. I told them to go away. I wanted to be a millionaire working minerals. I didn’t want to get mixed up with them.’ The men persisted. McLeod went back to his books. Five years later the bush lawyer was asked to address a meeting of law men at Skull Springs, east of Nullagine, a massacre site. It was a turning point for McLeod and the Pilbara. ‘There were twenty-three languages spoken,’ he recalled. ‘I reckoned then, and now, that they were the most civilised people in the world. Compared with them we’re just a mob of bloody barbarians who stole their country then ruined it, through overstocking. Everything we’ve got we stole from them.’10 What happened was this. Things moved slowly, the old blackfellas were very patient. Five years later was 1942, that big meeting at Skull Springs, chosen for its historical significance, but probably they’re not the words those old men would have used. They might have said something more like sorry place, I don’t know. The point is, they chose that place, and their guest was the thirty-four-year-old bush mechanic, taking after his dad with that set of skills. ‘Bush lawyer’ people also called him, a non-drinker, always with his head in a book, Hansards scattered around his camp, or later on listening to the BBC World Service on a transistor radio. There were two hundred law men at that secret meeting, from those twenty-three language groups. Some of the big names were Dooley Bin Bin, Nyamal Elder Peter ‘Kangushot’ Coppin and Clancy McKenna, whose story was later written down by Kingsley Palmer.11 He listened to what they had to say for the six weeks they were sitting down there. Five years later, and they had had plenty of time to choose their words, turn them around now in those twenty-three languages, plus English. How many concepts had to be discussed! Did some of those old men want to



Don McLeod’s Law

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sing the whitefellas, bewitch them maybe and be growled by Peter Coppin, ‘Naahh, go on, that kind of business don’t work with those fuckin’ cunts.’ Plenty of laughter too, those good old times. And the talk would go on, turning those precious words until consensus was reached. That’s the way they do it, until everyone agrees. Maybe only then they might stick their hands up to vote, which could be a little ritual Don McLeod had to introduce, one he might’ve picked up in union meetings. ‘Were you a communist?’ the journalist Duncan Graham asked McLeod, when he was old and said he had a hole in his head; cancer had gouged out his left eye: ‘I was for two weeks, until I found out how they treated their own workers.’12 McLeod had seen plenty already of how blackfellas lived and worked. As he said to Graham before he died, ‘Of course the strike was the start of the land rights movement . . . in those days it was like the American wild west. The squatters, the police and government were all in league. The Blackfellas were considered to be shit.’ They had, for decades, been exploited as their labour added the value that extracted profit from their country. From the 1890s to the 1920s, ‘natives’ were paid only in rations of food and clothing in return for pastoral work and the privilege of being allowed to stay on their own country. During the 1920s some workers started to receive minimal wages. Then, in 1936, the WA Native Affairs Act legally required pastoralists to provide shelter and meet the medical needs of their workers, but who knows what goes on out there on remote stations where the Head Stockman, white or black, could go around with side arms and bullets on his belt. ‘In those days it was like the American wild west,’ said Don McLeod. Aboriginal workers built their own corrugated iron humpies, dirt floors, no lighting or sanitation. Cooking was blackfella way on the fire. You didn’t worry about tables and chairs; sit on the ground. ‘More better’, they might joke, ‘can’t fall down’. Aboriginal people couldn’t even leave these places of so-called employment without permission – which is where we get the derogatory phrase go walkabout – and equal pay was unthinkable, possibly not even legal. Fair enough, let’s vote. They voted to go out on strike but were prepared to put it off until the war was over. When the time came, they had to be coordinated. On the stations there were no phones or radios and the Aboriginal workers couldn’t read or write English. So Dooley Bin Bin went around all the stations on a bicycle, just pretending to be passing through to see his relatives, with a kind of message-stick technology, calendars made of labels from jam tins, on which people marked off each passing day so they could all go out at the same time. Jackson, Dooley and Clancy McKenna were, in fact, among nine committee members delegated to spread the word. The station owners got wind of this and just laughed. At Warrawagine station, a mistake was made and the strike began two days early. The police were out

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there investigating when all the other stations went out on strike on May 1st.13 This was timed to be just before shearing, and they were asking for thirty shillings a week, and musterers on De Grey station were awarded this pay rise, from twenty shillings, a few days before the strike began, but they still quit in solidarity. So on May 1st when hundreds of Aboriginal workers left twenty stations, 10,000 square kilometres of sheep farming country was affected. They gathered at strike camps – Twelve Mile outside Port Hedland and Moolyella near Marble Bar – where they would spend much of the following three years. Daisy Bindi had demanded and received wages from her white station boss and then used the money to hire a truck to collect the workers. Gaols with limited capacity were filling up, making it less likely for magistrates to strictly apply laws such as the prohibition on ‘enticing’ Aborigines to leave employment. Numbers could thus be used as tactics; solidarity emerged as a part of the strike concept, as it demonstrated the weakness of the whitefella laws. Thus, the reality of Aboriginal employment in the Pilbara was forever changed. In this way, many Aborigines got their first taste of economic independence. Although the striking stockmen won award rates in 1949, most never returned to the stations. The sheep stations were paralysed without Aboriginal labour, but the blackfellas had long planned how they would reorganise in order to survive; the strikers coordinated the collection of minerals like wolfram, buffel seed and pearl shells, and hunted kangaroo and goats to sell the skins. By 1951–1953, they were 700 strong, and only about 250 remained on the pastoral stations. Their goods were marketed through McLeod’s networks of unionists, women’s organisations, churches and others who united to support the group economically and politically. Later, under McLeod’s tutelage, the group – by then known as the Strelley mob – became miners using picks, shovels and bare hands. They sold their high-quality metals overseas, again through Don’s networks, and used the proceeds from all their enterprises to develop businesses, buy cattle stations like Yandeyarra, establish an independent school and provide services for their people like aged care and a clinic. For many hard years, the Strelley mob’s rations consisted of two pairs of shorts and shirts a year, tobacco, flour and tea leaf. Don camped with the mob, living by himself in a tin shed with a dirt floor and tea chests for furniture. He could ‘talk the hind leg off a donkey on any topic’, said Jan Richardson in her obituary: He detested missionaries, Whites and government men, but if a White person’s credentials were accepted he welcomed fellow workers – that is, if they could keep up with this man who could go without water in the intense Pilbara heat, stride out over rocks and spinifex with the speed of the Indigenous people,



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survive on a meagre diet and feel no pain. He had no tolerance for those with a weaker constitution.14

Institutional Connections and Forces It is clear, from what has been argued so far, that in this cross-cultural and colonising situation we are dealing not with two autonomous social systems with a vague frontier line between them, nor with one system where organising concepts are held in common and are easily shared and understood. I think that it is more the case that as a consequence of matters of concern, institutions are mobilised to put these matters on their agendas. They then work at maintaining networks that negotiate to create the reality. In the case of the Pilbara strike of 1946–1949, the institutions were both blackfella and whitefella ones, and they were not grand edifices, they were precarious associations of people that had to struggle to maintain their network linkages and to give life to the concept of the strike. McLeod, for instance, encountered trade unionism while working on the Port Hedland wharf in the early years of the War, but he had also observed Aboriginal living situations all his life, and more particularly as he was working at water-boring operations out of Nullagine at the same time.15 He listened to news commentaries by Bill Beeby on radio 6 pm–6 am, and in the same Marxist spirit, offered to the programme his interpretation of the Aborigines’ situation. At the same time he contacted the Anti-Fascist League. This was his networking-cum-concept development. Meanwhile, on the blackfella side, a senior law man called Kitchener, according to John Wilson, got into conversation with McLeod when they were both working on Bonney Downs station. This led to McLeod being invited to the Skull Creek meeting described above. This meeting, which went on for over a month, was an education in traditional law for McLeod. It was focused on the traditional matters of that particular institution, but then morphed into a ‘grass roots’ meeting concerned with ‘exploitation by the pastoralists’ and ‘collective action’.16 By 1943, the Commissioner for Native Affairs was already alarmed by McLeod’s activism, having been visited and interrogated by McLeod in Perth, and tried to withdraw his right to employ Aboriginal labour. McLeod and his Aboriginal mates also ran up against the ‘association clause’ in the Aboriginal regulation that made it an offence for a whitefella to be within five chains of a gathering of ‘natives’.17 After the strike started, McLeod, Dooley and Clancy were arrested and sentenced to three months hard labour for ‘enticing Aborigines from their place of employment’.18 McLeod got word out of gaol via a sympathetic ‘police boy’, and his friends in Perth were able to form the Committee for the Defence of Native

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Rights at a meeting at Perth Town Hall on May 28th, less than a month after the strike had started. This was attended by ‘church personnel, writers, academics, union and welfare representatives and members of the communist party’,19 a loose left-wing alliance that was a product of McLeod’s networking and lobbying. They enlisted a lawyer and the prisoners were released on appeal. This evidence of a capacity to both challenge the law and win against those in authority was a new concept for the Aborigines, and greatly encouraged them. Concepts, I have argued, are no epistemological bedrock lying at the foundations of social organisation. They constitute part of the reality of that social organisation and this reality has to be built up in a piecemeal fashion via alliances and connections. We can thus have no epistemological faith in the word as a transhistorical and transcultural carrier of meanings, independently of the institutions, stories, technologies (bicycles, ‘jam-tin’ calendars) and contingencies of other sorts that install the reality as it emerges. Notes 1. Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Kensington: University of NSW Press, 2004). 2. The terms ‘whitefella’ and ‘blackfella’ are vernacular terms that usefully express a certain reciprocity. 3. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also The UTS Review 7.1 Subaltern/Indigenous/Multicultural, May 2001. 4. Bruno Latour, ‘The Recall of Modernity – Anthropological Approaches’, Cultural Studies Review (March 2007): 11–30. 5. For arguments against the reproduction of a ‘universalising’ academic culture via the ‘authoritative plain style’, see Karen Bennett, ‘Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalization’, Social Semiotics 17 (2007): 171–93; and Meaghan Morris, ‘A Small Serve of Spaghetti’, Meanjin 69.4 (Summer 2010): 98–106. 6. See Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. See Frank Hardy, The Unlucky Australians (Melbourne: Nelson, 1968). 8. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. 9. Duncan Graham, ‘Rebel of the Pilbara’, The Age, 2 May 1996. 10. Ibid.; Don McLeod, How the West was Lost: The Native Question in the Development of Western Australia, published by the author, Port Hedland, 1984. 11. Kingsley Palmer and Clancy MacKenna, Somewhere Between Black and White: The Story of an Aboriginal Australian (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1978).



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12. According to John Wilson’s account, ‘The main sources of support for improvements in Aboriginal status came from the churches . . . and the Australian Communist Party.’ Wilson, ‘The Pilbara Aboriginal Social Movement: An Outline of its Background and Significance’, in Aborigines of the West: Their Past and Their Present, ed. Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1980), 162. 13. Ibid. 14. Jan Richardson, ‘Don McLeod (1908 to 1999)’, The Age, 21 April 1999. 15. Wilson, ‘The Pilbara Aboriginal Social Movement’, 160. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 161. 18. Ibid., 162. 19. Ibid.

Chapter 2

The Mother’s Day Protest

As Jim Clifford taught me, we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections. —Donna Haraway1

Teresa Roe is incandescent with rage as she points south down the road and yells at the convoy of trucks to get back to where they came from and leave her country alone. She is the mother of mothers; ten children herself, and she had to bring up her sister’s as well, nearly as many again. And, like fertility gone wild, how many ‘grannies’ belong to her and her two sisters? 127, we roughly counted, sitting down one day in the camp at Murdudun. Teresa is a Goolarabooloo woman from Broome, Western Australia. Her country was colonised only in the late nineteenth century. Her father, Paddy Roe, lived into his nineties, so he saw almost the full time-span of domination and expropriation, from pastoral feudalism to today’s neo-liberal globalised economy. He often used to say, ‘generation after generation’, with a tumbling hands gesture, to talk of his peoples’ way of living in the country, from the past to the future. In this chapter, I want to think more about what that gesture – about thousands of years of living on country – might mean for the contemporary Goolarabooloo. It is a gesture reproducing cyclical kinship: in Aboriginal English your ‘granny’ is both your grandparent and your grandchild. The traditional ‘skin’ names also cycle: ‘My Yawuru skin name is Banaga and my children are all Garimba, just like my mother,’ says Pat Torres, who also acknowledges that ‘all the groups that I am related to belong to the “saltwater culture” or gularrabulu, also spelled goolarabooloo, which translates approximately to “the place in the west”’.2 13

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Human beings, Paddy Roe would also say, act to energise the life of the country, which is destined to grow, generation after generation. Without children to initiate into multispecies belonging, how can one keep the country alive? But when the trucks owned by a global corporation arrived to start building a massive gas plant, they had a different idea of growth in mind, one that would have enhanced a different kind of life from that engendered and reproduced by Teresa’s family. No doubt this is why she is enraged: for her, survival, life itself, is the issue. We all know life is complex, but it does no harm to try to spell out the sets of relations it engenders. For Teresa’s people, it is traditionally a complex of water sources, spirit beings, ancient songs and stories, animals, plants and constellations in the heavens. She told us about her concerns in a film we made with Aaron Burton, Sunset Ethnography: . . . ’cos we still fighting themto stop the gaswe don’t want the gas thereand we been there from day one, you know from bugarrigarra, from dreamtimeand we don’t want the country to get destroyed(. . .) I can’t go to sleep at night I’m thinking about my old countryNot sleeping you know ‘cos me and my younger sister spirit come from that Jabirr Jabirr country- (SM: that’s right)because my Dad was Nyigina man, my mother was Karajarri woman and they runaway to that country and the last old people said to them, ‘we got two little spirit girls to give you two’- (SM: two rayi) Two rayi, true thenAnd that’s why we fighting that other mobDon’t want my country to get destroyed(MT: Not for sale) Not for sale! I don’t want their money, I want my country aliveSo I can live little bit more longer, I lost my two brothers and two sisters alreadyI’m only one left out of fiveSo I got to be strongAnd I got great grandchildrenAnd grandchildrenBut I’m still here for them (S: yeah)Fighting for this country(SM: That’s right) I don’t want to leave the country get destroyed-3



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Freud, with a long European history of the interiorisation of life-forces behind him – all that soul-stuff – focused the reproductive biological engine onto the parent–child triangle. Psychic forces were impacted there, much more than physical ones. Literal, physical interiorisation goes really well with a civilisation that likes to sort nuclear families into one little house each. But in Goolarabooloo country, life is distributed quite differently. When a child is born it has several mothers, because care and responsibility are distributed among the aunties. The cradle of devotion has many hands, and it is spread far and wide across the country and folded into various other forms of life, including the rayi, the spirit children that come to mothers when they walk in special places in the country. A barni (type of lizard) is not just ‘in nature’ in the same way as a waterhole or a gum tree. It has a unique signature as it moves through the world (and people can read its tracks straightaway). Its life is distributed along spiritual tracks – there are dreaming stories about barni – and in relation to those humans whose behaviour it regulates precisely: ‘Do not hunt me in the wrong season,’ it tells everyone through its mode of existence, ‘share my meat properly with your elders,’ etc. What an incredible breadth of vision Paddy Roe is articulating as he rolls his hands over each other and talks of the life of the country as persisting for so many generations. So much for those preemptory assessments of Aboriginal Australians as ‘primitive hunter-gatherers’; these are people who had successfully worked out how the energies flowed through the country and through all its kin, nurturing each other. So it is important that they all are able to reproduce that necessary life-complex, according to the bugarrigarra law, which also specifies that families are matrilocal. Things should grow around Teresa and her daughters; her sons should find wives elsewhere.4 Fantastic amounts of gas The huge gas reserves in the Browse Basin, covering 180,000 square kilometres off the Kimberley coast, had been known about for decades. The Pilbara region to the south was already a major mining area and driver of Australia’s recent economic boom, and extraction industries were looking to move north to develop other reserves as well: diamonds, mineral sands, iron ore, copper, lead, zinc, silver, nickel, uranium, coal, tin and onshore petroleum and shale gas.5 For this to happen, the right elements had to fall into place, and a proposal for Woodside Energy to build a $40 billion gas plant on the Dampier peninsula had already been rejected by traditional owners, along with the offer of a generous ‘compensation package’. But by 2010, the Kimberley Land Council and the state were negotiating to bring Woodside back to develop the capacity to extract the gas, mainly for Asian

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markets, once it was liquefied at a plant to be located at Walmadany (James Price Point) on the coast of the Dampier peninsula. This was traditional Jabirr Jabirr country that had been given to Paddy Roe and was being looked after by the Goolarabooloo, who also run an annual ecotourism venture, the Lurujarri Heritage Trail. Woodside Energy has a vision for the Kimberley that is shared by the state and its other allies, a very common one: industrialisation and modernisation along universal lines. They don’t express it well: ‘Experience the Energy’ is its website headline, and the text is the usual spam about delivering ‘superior shareholder returns’ and ‘unlocking future growth’, concluding with the curious assertion that Woodside is ‘open and honest in our relationships. Sharing ideas and aspirations we have the courage to always do the right thing for our people, partners, customers and communities.’6 For the activists who gathered in the protest camp at Walmadany and held the country with their occupancy for over four years, sometimes numbering over a hundred people, the encounter with Woodside was anything but ‘open and honest’. They clashed with the subcontracted security guards, known as ‘hostiles’, employees from Hostile Environmental Services Pty. Ltd., who emerged from white four-wheel drives with tinted windows in reflector sunglasses to harass or film the activists. The convoy of heavy trucks heading north was just a thin line of modernisation, pushing beyond the township of Broome to continue the colonisation that had begun 130 years ago. The secrecy and profit-seeking aggression had already started in the clubs and boardrooms of the powerful and continued right through to the front line where the police and ‘hostiles’ met the protesters. Is Teresa Roe’s rage enough to deflect that thin line of modernisation? Is it her rage, or is she on the crest of a wave that is surging through the bodies of all those active in the campaign? How is it that feelings like this rise up and spread around to do their political work? Sing it now, goddess, sing through me Two of the most powerful feelings that surge through our social body are eros and thymos, desire and rage. Eros is blown up and cheapened as it is hooked into commodity porn in a million ways, but rage – the righteous anger of those treated unjustly – is unsupported by any economy. It has to find other pathways. I learnt about rage from Peter Sloterdijk, who starts his ambitious world history Rage and Time7 with the opening line of Homer’s Iliad, the first words of the great European oral-literary tradition, and here I use Mitchell’s recent translation: ‘The rage of Achilles – sing it now, goddess, sing through me/the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief.’8



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The goddess sings through Homer, and down through generations of translators to us today, as in the great Australian Indigenous oral traditions. It is a performance that pushes and pulls, that sorts out what we might be attracted to or repulsed from, love or hate. I want to analyse the politics of the gas plant dispute in terms of such rhetorics, because successful politics is about getting the numbers. You talk people into your sphere of influence, but with a wrong tone or a badly conceived phrase, the numbers can quickly drop away. Politics doesn’t work because it has ‘sound policies in place’, but because it reaches out again and again, reinventing the phrases every day. The truth of politics is not like the truth of history, which can accumulate in books. It is in the charm of attraction, and because politicians have to talk to new audiences every day in different languages, they are often accused of forgetting yesterday’s promises or lying. Local charms Broome is a pretty town, with a rich Aboriginal and Asian history. In the hinterland and up the coast people find plenty of those things they like to call ‘nature’. So, visitors often fall under its spell, come back in the tourist season, and the caravan parks fill to capacity. For some retirees, a new lifestyle in Broome is the reward of a lifetime of labour. Others come to Broome simply because the work is there, but they will usually add that they like the beach or the fishing. For the Indigenous locals, Broome has been their home ‘from day one’, but they too want their fair share of ‘the good life’, whatever opportunities are on offer. Just what the ‘good life’ might be in a place like Broome is what is at issue as people try to organise themselves for a better future in that place. Thirty years ago there was no Indigenous middle class in Broome. It is certainly there today and has emerged, according to anthropologist Marcia Langton, because the mining industry has provided Australia with ‘thousands of jobs for Aboriginal people and hundreds of businesses set up by Aboriginal entrepreneurs’.9 As an Aboriginal leader, Langton has struck deals with mining companies and clearly sees participation in this industry as the way forward for ‘remote’ Australia. She is contemptuous of ‘rag tag team[s] of “wilderness” campaigners [who] turn up with an entourage of disaffected (and perpetually dissident) Aboriginal protesters to stop development at the eleventh hour’.10 She could be talking about the Goolarabooloo and their allies. But in Broome, middle-class Indigenous people are more likely to be employed in ‘Health care and social assistance’ (1,132 people in 2011, going up 110 per cent since 2001, compared to 253 people in mining, going up 120 per cent over the same period).11 These are general figures, and Aboriginal

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people in mining are less likely to have the middle-class jobs at manager levels. ‘Education and training’ and ‘Public Administration and safety’ are also large employers that are not likely to be spin-offs of mining development. It’s difficult to put a precise figure on it, but mining in Broome is small fry when it comes to economic benefits to the town, especially if one takes into account two further facts. A large percentage of workers for the mining industry in Western Australia are fly-in fly-out, and the profits are dispersed globally rather than reinvested locally. In Broome, the tourism industry is the major competitor for mining. Its infrastructure is in place, including a ‘natural’ feature, the famous Cable Beach. It supports both work and ‘lifestyle’, while mining can only support work, especially if mining activities were eventually to destroy aspects of local beauty. That, in brief, is how the economic debate can be framed: On the one hand, there is the Western Australian government and the Woodside consortium, with the help of some Indigenous organisations like the Kimberly Land Council, arguing for the development of mining and heavy industry that would ‘open up’ the Kimberley; and on the other, an alliance of Indigenous groups, led by the Goolarabooloo, plus NGOs like Save the Kimberley, Environs Kimberley, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the No Gas movement that seek to protect law and culture and the environment. Now, how was this issue played out on the ground, over four years, with its divisive effects still being felt today in the community? My problem is how to describe political courses of action that take place across a vast array of sites, yet somehow interconnect. There are actions instantiated in capital cities and in Broome that can take the form of laws passed, policy documents, press releases or inventive popular reactions: they can be ‘top down’ or ‘bottom up’ in their movements. Where to begin, or continue, in order to ‘stay with the trouble’, as Haraway advises? Since what mattered for Broome converged on that town, and it was ‘on the ground’ that the battles were waged (not in far-off boardrooms or committees), it will be there that I will present some more vignettes and try to tease out their significant links. Ecosexual warriors In the middle of the campaign, someone posted a photo on Facebook of three naked women on the beach. They had N O G A S! written in big red capital letters on their six buttocks and looked a bit like the Three Graces, except they were facing an oil rig in the sea and giving it the finger, six fingers! This recalled for me a composition of the young Bob Dylan, ‘I Shall Be Free,’ where he sings about President Kennedy calling him on the phone and asking how to make the country grow. Bob’s answer is Brigitte Bardot, Anita Ekberg



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and Sophia Loren. ‘Country’ll grow,’ the verse concludes. He was dating Joan Baez at the time. Later, she became a feminist. The three graceful activists might have been reading philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Their ecosexual politics makes literal what he would call their ‘bare life’: we have nothing left but our bodies to fight with, what you, the State, has reduced us to.12 It’s a lot, paradoxically. Patriarchy gets all flustered when women take control of their own sexuality. That basic human reproductive power is supposed to be under control and hidden away, not out in the open disrupting the usual scripts for the usual courses of action. And for sure, that is what activism does: it disrupts the dominant organizational scripts. It has to be inventive, by blocking, deflecting or reorganising political courses of action.

Stuff written on their dogs I asked spokesperson Nik Wevers, flower-shop owner and ex Deputy shire president of Broome, about the workings of the politics of the concert on Cable Beach on the 17th July 2011. It is widely thought to have been a turning point in the campaign.13 A crowd of between 5,000 and 10,000 people turned up on that Sunday to be entertained or to express their opposition to the gas plant. Tensions were running high because less than a fortnight earlier, on the 5th of July, 25 people were arrested as police and protesters clashed on the road to Walmadany. Police cleared the road by tackling protesters and dragging them out of the way of Woodside vehicles. People were injured; abuse was hurled at police. That day is now remembered as Black Tuesday. There was no permission to stage the concert, so the performers’ stage was on a boat offshore. Nik Wevers remembers trying to allay the fears of current shire president, Graham Campbell, who asked her: ‘Nik, what’s this story about an event on Cable Beach?’ ‘Oh, Graham, it’s just a picnic.’ ‘But it’s a proper event, it’s on Facebook!’

And she explained the difference between a Facebook event and a ‘real’ one in such a way that he was convinced not to worry, and then they proceeded to leaflet the town. People cleaned up after themselves, there was no security, hardly any extra police. ‘It was just a happy, good event. It was brilliant . . . and there were very few banners down there, mostly people with T-shirts, stuff written on their dogs, you know.’ Behind-the-scenes organiser and journalist Kirsty Cockburn had gathered the necessary funding for whatever had to be hired, and the next day there were follow-up reports in the

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media. It was characterised as a family day and had the effect, with the huge numbers for this medium-sized town, of unifying the community and creating a more positive ‘we love Broome’ feeling. A year later, this feeling would culminate with the Mother’s Day protest.

Deflecting fear with a shield and a medal Why wouldn’t people be frightened when the police come after them? Paddy Roe remembers the violence of colonisation and how ‘half-caste’ children like him were taken away to Beagle Bay Mission. Others remember the violence of ‘blackbirding’ for the pearling fleets, when men and women were forced to dive, and could be killed or raped if they didn’t comply. This founding violence of colonisation reverberates down the generations and the terror is only increased if the stories are only half-told, when the state has taken no responsibility, or actively denies this history. There was a massacre in the early days at Walmadany, Paddy Roe told me, but added that ‘people don’t like to talk about bad things’, so I didn’t insist. Did he fear speaking out? On another occasion he referred to me as his garbina, shield. Now, when a man becomes another’s shield, the metaphor is a charming technique because it engenders political solidarity and loyalty. The metaphor is an articulation that puts the two men in the same sphere. A few years later, Lulu, as we called him, charmed people again when he was photographed after receiving his Order of Australia medal. In a photograph he is shown – T-shirts for the campaign were made with this image – holding the medal, like a little round mini-shield, side by side with his garbina, carved with the traditional lightening-strike design for Goolarabooloo country, putting them into a dialogue and challenging them each to perform their protective role. This is, in turn, a more magical challenge to us, the viewers, looking down through history via the photograph, to let ourselves be drawn into its sphere of influence. Under the photo someone had typed: This is my gulbinna [sic] (shield). The government gave me this medal. This gulbinna is asking the medal, you going to break up the country or keep it the same as in bugarre garre [sic] (dreamtime).

You can easily find that image online, gaze at it for a moment while thinking that the people of the Kimberley have been subjected to successive waves of fear since the late nineteenth century. I think we can accept that this terror was a part of dispossession, and that it continues, reproducing itself, to the present day with the compulsory acquisition of land at Walmadany. In May 2012, a contingent of over 150 police was sent from Perth to Broome to break



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up the protest camps of about thirty people, as support for the gas plant began to dissipate, and even Woodside was selling some of its stake in the venture.14 Fear and terror are not circulating ‘out there’ in the world, in society, nor are they locked ‘in our hearts’, but ricochet between the two. Maybe this individual-society opposition has run out of usefulness, when we want to talk about the irrational way fears move. Fears do not need a personal subject any more than they need a government department. Fears pass like wet-season clouds; they are impersonal.15 This impersonality of affect has consequences for how we do our anthropology or our cultural studies ethnographies. We can talk of new kinds of collectivities where we can ‘entertain entities in multiple, interesting and fragile, states’.16 Peter Sloterdijk uses the image of spheres, fragile ‘bubbles’ tumbling around and forming alliances. Spheres are interiorities that are defined, as Sloterdijk says, by their passage to the outside through mechanisms of attraction, repulsion and flow. Inside a sphere individuals are ‘co-isolated associations’, drawn together for protection and immunity from outside threats. Spheres are a way of rethinking, experimentally, that lazy old concept of ‘society’: By ‘society’ we understand an aggregate of micro-spheres (couples, households, companies, associations) of different formats that are adjacent to one another like individual bubbles in a mound of foam and are structured one layer over/under the other, without really being accessible to or separable from one another.17

The interiority of a sphere is constituted by the elements inside breathing the same atmosphere, or having the same values, while being surrounded by a membrane that provide immunity. To this I would add Latour’s idea of partnerships or allies in political causes, as different spheres are drawn together in political association. Yet, these spheres are fragile, and tactics of imitation are political tactics that attempt to redraw the spatial map of the way these spheres associate. That the bubble of capitalist confidence is constantly under threat of bursting may not be such an arbitrary metaphor, and it certainly applied in the case of Woodside’s tenuous relationship with its joint venture partners.

A Platonic Love Story Sunday the 13th May, 2012 in Broome, Mothers’ Day, provided an ‘atmosphere’ in which the anti-gas protesters tried the charms of love hearts, flowers and children to lure the police into imitative association and hence into a mutual sphere of protection (‘Please protect us, don’t arrest us,’ said my

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friend Deborah Vincent’s handmade sign). The protesters were trying to create a common sphere with the police, because they cannot assume they are already securely in one (as co-citizens of the nation, for instance), and they were in fear of the police arresting them if they protested, or at least putting ‘yellow stickers’ on their unroadworthy cars. This spell was exercised in the context of the fear of the presence of the large police contingent in town and of the memory of the previous year’s Black Tuesday. It’s a ‘Platonic love story’ and its rhetoric seems to say, ‘We are all within the charmed circle of mother-love-fertility, and within yet another, larger, sphere of national celebration.’ All this is spatially organised: imitative rather than communicative. The form of a Platonic love story is the mechanism for this. ‘Love stories are stories of form,’ says Peter Sloterdijk, ‘and that every act of solidarity is an act of sphere formation.’18 As a formal technique, it depends on ‘casting a spell’ and it must be formally, ritually, performed. We could posit a simple taxonomy of two kinds of charm here: those that attract life (by conjuring up goodness) and those that protect life (by delivering us from evil). Fears, then, don’t attach themselves to subjects or objects in a permanent fashion, but must be deflected as they pass. In the preface, we saw how Al Lingis had a technique for deflecting the insult with wit. So, this kind of analysis of collectivities (rather than a psycho-social analysis, swinging on an individual–society or a subject–object binary), takes quite seriously the strange movements of affect around the ‘body’ of the public. Is there not some truth in the description which shows that charm, the sacred and beauty can deflect terror, can make it pass by without transferring into the very subjectivity of beings, fragile as they are. So, we don’t necessarily have to believe in a stubborn psychology of ‘inner strength’ to save us, nor, on the other hand, a robust social organisation, despite the appeal to the institution of the police force here. No one can ever ‘believe’ in this, not the flower-power protesters, not the police – and yet, the charm worked, not because it made rational sense, but simply because it was put together rather well. A traditional protest song was played to the crowd as it gathered (Judy Small, ‘Never turning back/Keep on walking proudly/Keep on loving boldly’). Then, there were a couple of speeches by leading individuals. A letter had been drafted and the police were invited to come out and receive it along with bouquets of flowers ‘to present to the police, and their mothers, or their wives’. They refused to come out and some more anger was vented: ‘They can’t give five minutes of their time.’ The event concluded with people filing in to the station and occupying at least thirty minutes of the desk officer’s time as he received each bouquet and thanked the protesters politely. Some police officers, apparently, were touched. Some might have felt it was better than being in danger up the road at the blockade, having abuse hurled at them for being Woodside stooges.



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Mumbo jumbo or being modern? Cissy Djiagween was crying when she was interviewed in mid-April 2013 after Woodside pulled out of the gas project, and the Goolarabooloo supporters were down at the Roebuck Hotel celebrating the decision. ‘I feel betrayed by my people,’ she said. ‘Woodside had got our spirit up. It was our country and this was a way we could work the country to benefit us, our children and generations to come with health, education and jobs.’19 She was referring to the $1.5 billion compensation package that was promised if the project had gone ahead. Opponents to mining often put the counterargument that ‘health, education and jobs’ were the kind of infrastructure that every citizen should expect and that Indigenous people should not be the exceptional case and have to trade away their rights to the country. It is too easy to polarise the opposition as one between the modernisers and the traditionalists. Marcia Langton, being pro-mining, sees the opponents of mining as ‘romantics, leftists and worshippers of nature’20 who promote the idea of the ‘new noble savage’ and hold back Indigenous progress, ‘isolat[ing] the Aboriginal world from Australian economic and social life’.21 She may be right that participation in the mining industry is not incompatible with forms of traditional life, and mining companies may even assist by funding small community projects. I would say she has ignored the corruption and pollution that are the by-products of mining. Communities can be divided as compatible traditional owners are hand-picked for the jobs, pollution is left for someone else to clean up and infrastructure promises go unfulfilled.22 I am eager to find an example of a community where people live happy and fulfilled lives, thanks to mining. According to Alex Golub’s research, the Ipili people in Papua New Guinea struck a lucrative deal and started off in a promising relationship with one of the biggest gold mines on the planet, but it led, after a decade, to environmental destruction, ill-health and social dysfunction.23 The modernisation narrative that has some of the people I have quoted in its thrall is a script that rolls out an apparatus with its strange methods and concepts in place. Nature is taken as being ‘out there’, alienated from ‘us’ and a source of free materials (the infrastructure is very costly, but once the gas starts flowing it is ‘free’). The moderns, for whom the engineer is like a universal figure, have left behind all superstitions involving intimate or spiritual connections with non-human things and beings – that would be all mumbo jumbo. And if we are Indigenous people we would do well to assimilate to this modernist script and take pride in no longer believing in sorcery.24 We can be confident that the modern world – rational, efficient, profitable – will look after us. We are so sure that this modern world is purged of dangerous beliefs that we will no longer need any techniques for protection from harm, ways of deflecting evil. Charm, poetry and magic will be mere

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decorations. That would all be stuff of romantic literature classes, or of the bugarrigarra, which we could use from time to time as a brand name for our Indigeneity, but give up practising its rituals. This is why cultural analysis needs to take multiple perspectives and aim to discover the vitalising central beliefs of any culture it comes across, bearing in mind that the modernist conceptual architecture in play conditions thought from the very start. You know what the central kernel is when people will lay down their life for it. Joseph Roe, Teresa’s youngest son, said before he passed away that the last thing he would give up in any negotiation is the right to protect law and culture, bugarrigarra. At the time, he was the bugarrigarra’s strongest garbina. While his major opponent, Premier Barnett, might say that the last thing he will give up is the right to profit from nature, which is why he called that particularly beautiful stretch of coastline ‘unremarkable’ – a political blunder among the voting public of Broome. For him, James Price Point, Walmadany, was an empty space for Woodside to occupy. For the Goolarabooloo, it was full of heritage, full of Indigenous (and activist) tactics for togetherness, a sphere where there is a cosmos, a vital experience of humans, plants, animals, stars and spirits being animated together. In such living country there is spatial tightness, with spheres abutting each other and sometimes dissolving into each other when they find they are swimming in the same atmospheres, breathing the same oxygen. It also means that discourses of emancipation don’t work so well. It will not be a question henceforth of cutting ties in order to liberate, but of sometimes cutting ties in order to engineer productive connections that perform better. This has consequences for the writing of ethnographies which work in close with their partners in the critical proximity characteristic of forms of fictocritical writing. Critical proximity means not working one’s way to a neutral ‘perspective’ out in that empty space somewhere that claims overview and impartial judgement. It means a contingent and negotiated earning the right to participation in a particular sphere. The point of my story has been a double one. I think that charm (negative or positive) is a neglected factor in the way that politics goes about the business of reproducing its forms of life. And I think that Indigenous people have always participated in (whitefella) modernity, more or less successfully, most often less, because the whitefellas like to keep the financial rewards. This participation did not start with the contemporary mining boom, but through the whole history of economies of extraction, that is, the alienation of value from country: pearl-shell, sheep, cattle, fishing, tourism. When you know you are earthbound, connected to your territory like the Goolarabooloo never tire of asserting, then you know that the universal modernist script is unsustainable and must be cleverly interrupted, so that finally they will understand that value must be put back into the country as well as taken from it.



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Notes 1. Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65, 160. She is referring to James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 2. Pat Mamanyjun Torres, ‘Nila.Ngany – Possessing/belonging to Knowledge: Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Yawuru Aboriginal Australia’, in Indigenous Peoples’ Wisdom and Power: Affirming Our Knowledge Through Narrative, ed. Nomalungelo I. Goduka and Julian E. Kunnie (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), 21. 3. Sunset Ethnography, directed by Aaron Burton (Kurrajong Films, 2014), https://vimeo.com/113130961. With Michael Taussig [M.T.] and Stephen Muecke [S.M.]. 4. Paddy Roe, fieldwork tape recording, June 1977. 5. (DIR) Regional Minerals Program, Developing the West Kimberley’s Resources, August 2005. 6. http://www.woodside.com.au/About-Us/Profile/Pages/home.aspx#. Vi7CWLRNNGx. 7. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 8. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Atria, 2011), 1. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. Marcia Langton, The Quiet Revolution: Indigenous People and the Resources Boom (Sydney: ABC Books, 2012), 78. 11. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011. 12. Giorgio Agamben, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 13. Nik Wevers, Interview by the author, Broome, 14 May 2014. 14. h ttp :/ /w ww.t he a ust ra l i a n. c om .a u / na ti onal-affairs/ state-p olit ics/ blue-line-in-red-dirt-as-gas-tensions-rise-in-broome/story-e6frgczx-1226355320781. 15. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 52. 16. Latour, Factish Gods, 66. 17. Sloterdijk, quoted in Christian Borch, ‘Foamy Business: On the Organizational Politics of Atmospheres’, in Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphereological Poetics of Being, ed. W. Schinkel and L. Noordegraaf-Eelens (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 29–42, 31. 18. Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, 12. 19. Glenn Cordingley, ‘Hopes Die with Gas Hub Decision’, The West Australian, 15 April 2013, https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/16728609/hopes-dieswith-gas-hub-decision/. 20. Langton, The Quiet Revolution, 101. 21. Ibid., 32–33. 22. See Tom Stevens, recently retired as MLA for the Pilbara, speaking in the film Heritage Fight. Dir. Eugénie Dumont, Keystone Films, 2012; Elizabeth

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A. Povinelli, Windjarrameru, the Stealing C*nts, http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/ texts/windjarrameru-the-stealing-c-nts/. 23. Alex Golub, Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea (Durham, NC: Duke, 2014). 24. Isabelle Stengers, ‘History through the Middle: Between Macro and Mesopolitics’, Inflexions, no. 3, http://www.inflexions.org/n3_History-through-theMiddle-Between-Macro-and-Mesopolitics-1.pdf.

Chapter 3

The Great Tradition Translating Durrudiya’s Songs

I’m saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral and written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation and would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension. —Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings1

Let us consider the consequences of ‘graphocentrism’ (the fetishisation of the written word) and of ‘technocentrism’ (the fetishisation of the machine) in the history of world literature. It is precisely these two key and successive developments in the technology of language and its distribution that have supposedly placed European modernity in a leading position ever since the Enlightenment. The first, writing, defeated the frailty of human memory, and the second, printing, gave power to those ideas chosen for reproduction. While both statements are no doubt true, it is also the case that speech has not disappeared and that our most valued ideas are still those transmitted via a more embodied proximity through the affinities of family and friends. In fact, it is the process of translation from spoken forms to written and then the subsequent distribution that gives the ideas their power. This process of translation is really hard work, and it contains all sorts of mysteries. It is far from being a simple matter of transposition of form or content from the medium of the spoken word to the written or printed one. The process begins with somebody noticing something strange going on around them and then struggling to put this event into words. If there is nothing strange and no labour of expression, then there is no point to the events of language at all. 27

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Language would be as unexpressive as breathing – unchanging and not moving anything it encounters. You will notice that I am not saying that speech has priority over writing, because it came first in an evolutionary sense, or still comes first in an ontogenetic or naturalist one. Jacques Derrida has been here already. I am saying that processes of translation – complex mediations of languages, things and people – give certain ideas priority. Take the case of the Gutenberg Revolution and the printing of the Bible. Certainly the writing down of the gospels was important for the spreading of the word and certainly the appearance of the Bible in every household was equally important. But these words still have to be read out in sermons on Sundays, repeated in schools, whispered at prayer time, sworn on in courts of law and fought over in religious wars. These are all processes of translation in the sense of Bruno Latour, and they require embodied human effort. Christian ideas got lucky to the extent that humans were prepared to cherish them, labour over them, fight over them and print them. I will elaborate a little on Latour and translation later. Now, let us take our discussion to Australia. There’s a fair degree of consensus, I reckon, about what constitutes Australian literature, among the writers, publishers, academics and critics: Australian literature is in English, and it is written. The upheaval that was brought about in Australian archaeology and in history, when those fields engaged with data from before colonisation, has not really touched the shape of our literary culture. The discovery of Mungo Lady in 1969 suddenly transformed the scale of Australian history; Australian deep history now went back forty or sixty thousand years, and this became a catch-cry for Indigenous politics and then for what was to become known as the cultural renaissance. This was not news for Indigenous peoples, but it made this ancient history public in a dramatic way, coupled with the kind of validation that science can bring. In the process, the concept of Indigenous sovereignty was strengthened. In history, only a few years later, a new set of archives was being uncovered and Aboriginal histories proliferated. These were often written by, or in collaboration with, Indigenous people, and they had quite a new perspective, one that came from ‘the other side of the frontier’, to use Henry Reynolds’ phrase. A bit later, in the visual arts, the Papunya phenomenon had a revolutionary effect on representations of the Australian landscape. The global art market agreed: this movement originating in central Australia became the most significant thing to happen in Australian visual arts in the latter half of the twentieth century. The whitefella landscape artists must have felt a little marginalised after the considerable success of the previous generation of figures like Fred Williams, John Olsen and Sir Sidney Nolan. Perhaps the success



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of the ‘dot’ paintings was because, being abstractly visual, they could be so easily misinterpreted. The translation of this visual language onto canvas and removed from any ceremonial context, with only a cursory synopsis of the ‘story’ or associated ‘dreaming’ attached, made them easy to sell into all sorts of markets, facilitated also, no doubt, by an implicit primitivist framing. No such luck for the literary arts that are the subject of my discussion. How much work has to be done by a linguist-poet knowledgeable in Arrernte, Pintupi, Worora or Wik-Munkan to translate a song cycle into English word by word, concept by concept. Problems of rhythm, figures of speech, cultural codings. They are also produced by quite different concepts of creativity and authorship, which I have described elsewhere.2 These are the same songs that the painters seated around a canvas sing as they work. The cultural bedrock is the same. At this very spot the tradition is being transformed in two directions, at least two. From the fingers the paint descends onto the canvas and produces art commodities; from the lips the whispered words die on the breeze. There is no one there to translate them, except maybe the kids with their guitars. This then, is the tragedy and the missed opportunity for Australian literature. It could have drawn, and it still could draw, much more strongly on the Indigenous traditions. But to do so it has to subject itself to the humbling experience of comparing itself to the Great Tradition, as I am calling it, or rather great traditions, that are not reinventing themselves every thirty years, as Ivor Indyk puts it, as he was reported musing on the ‘idealism’ of his yearning ‘for a European notion of a literary community’: The culture [of Australian literature] is only 200 years old, not even that. There has been wave after wave of migration, so in a sense the culture reinvents itself every thirty years and is still in the process of formation. That’s a fascinating thing to watch and to be part of.3

Indyk, the editor and publisher of Alexis Wright, is a great supporter of Indigenous literature, but here he defaults to the conventional model of what ‘Australian literature’ is: literature written in English drawing on the Anglophone heritage, but renewed by waves of different kinds of traditions: nonEnglish-speaking migrants are registered here: I really like that sense that everything is provisional, and conditional, and you can’t be sure of its origins, or what traditions it’s bringing with it or how it should be read. For an interpreter that’s really exciting.4

I want to suggest that the Indigenous traditions in Australian literature are not just one of these ‘strange accents’ (as he says) coming along to renew the mainstream. This was not the case with the Papunya revolution in central

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Australia which raged through the art scene with the enormous levelling energy of a bush fire. This culture was reborn with the momentum of millennia of traditions behind it. Despite fifty to one hundred years of whitefellas predicting the demise of Indigenous cultures, these magnificent paintings burst through in massive abundance like desert flowers after rain. They had always been there. So, we wonder if it is still much too early to speak of the demise of Indigenous poetics. True, languages are disappearing. Many have been lost. But then, bearing in mind what I was saying about the poetics being carried by the work of the process of translation, the poetics does not reside in the forms of language, in a unitary language that can be lost, but in the techniques and abilities to change things. That is my understanding of tradition and how it works. A tradition is not a storehouse. A tradition is an understanding of how to transform things; it is a style with the momentum of a collectivity. So the tradition could, and would already be leaving, that language that might be disappearing. I am saying this partly because of the power of resurgence that we observed with the desert painting movement of the 1970s. It had power not because it stuck to its pure forms in ground and body painting, but because it changed in a movement to new materials: acrylic paint and canvas. Let’s now take a little trip to a small community in North West Australia, a place that people in the ‘settled’ areas like to call ‘remote Australia’. Mowanjum had a population of about 300 when I went there first in the 1970s. It is eight km out of Derby, which has 4000 people. Mowanjum has a missionary background, with people from Worora, Ngarinyin and Wunumbul tribal groups from the Mitchell plateau and King George Sound areas to the North. If you enter the term ‘Mowanjum’ for a search on the AustLit. Database, it produces thirty-three authors or organisations and twenty-nine works, most of them Indigenous. Four of these twenty-nine have more than five works each: • Barunga, Albert b. 1912 d. 1977 (thirteen works by) • Woolagoodjah, Sam b. ca.1905 d. 1979 (seven works by) • Utemorrah, Daisy b. February 1922 d. 1994 (eighty-one works by) • Umbagai, Elkin b. 19 February 1921 d. 24 January 1980 (seventeen works by) One of the most prominent men was David Mowaljarlai, who for some reason doesn’t appear on this initial list. A search under his name produces seventeen works by him. I only get sixty works, and I’ve been writing every day for thirty years or so. Newtown, where I live, gets 100 entries as a key word, and as an inner-city Sydney suburb with a population of 13,000, it has forty-three times the number of potential writers compared to Mowanjum, and one of the highest numbers of people with PhDs in the country. If the



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Newtown writers, with all their PhDs, were as prolific as the Mowanjum writers, the bookshops would be overflowing with their work. My point is that the Mowanjum traditions are much richer in terms of longevity (up to 50,000 years) and denser (number of literary producers). The settler literary traditions are scant, but they dominate because the alphabet and the printed word say they should. Yet, they are derivative because they come from Europe, they haven’t yet engaged with the country in the way that the Indigenous traditions always have. Listen to David Mowaljarlai on the word of God: We showed you that sharp hill over there, that’s Malara. It’s a kangaroo stomach. It fell out of the kangaroo and now it’s a mountain. People say it’s a joke, how can it come into a big mountain? People laugh, how can it be a kangaroo stomach, eh? I told one missionary, ‘Do you believe that God made those Ten Commandments? You take it seriously?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What is the mountain called where God gave those Ten Commandments to Moses?’ He said the name of it. ‘And is it important?’ ‘No, it is not important.’ ‘How come it is not important, wherever it was in Christian land?’ And then he tells me, ‘God gave the Law Tablets to Moses, that is important. The mountain is not important.’ How come? He has never been there, but he read about it in the Bible and he takes that more seriously. I don’t think the Christian missionaries take the Old Testament very seriously. ‘Too much law and too little salvation,’ I told him.5

It is the ‘Law Tablets’ that are important, the writing down of the law, and this writing makes the literature disengaged from places, makes it mobile and potentially imperial. The Ten Commandments have certainly gone a long way around the world. There is another curious side issue, a slight diversion that contributes to this argument, and it concerns the place of ethnographic writing in Australia. Marcia Langton has spoken of the ‘grand tradition of ethnography in Australia, that has produced, arguably, the most important literature in our history’.6 Her use of the phrase ‘grand tradition’ alerted me to my theme once again. She presumably means R. H. Mathews, Norman Tindale, Phyllis Kaberry, T. G. H. Strehlow, W. E. H. Stanner, A. P. Elkin, Donald Thompson, right through to Deborah Bird Rose today. It is a literature, but it is excluded for generic reasons from the literary canon, which is, of course, dominated by fiction. Remember how F. R. Leavis, a pioneer in the invention of the discipline of English literature, first defined the Great Tradition in 1948, a tradition that he was creating as he wrote?

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The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. . . . They are all distinguished by a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity.7

In 1948, for political reasons, the study of English literature was being forged as a discipline against the dominance of Germanic philological traditions in Oxford and Cambridge.8 It was thus a nationalist project. So I will have to be careful about just what kind of counternationalism I might be positing with an Indigenous Great Tradition. Nevertheless, the ‘grand tradition of ethnography in Australia’ is endorsed by Langton because it engages with what it finds in Indigenous Australia, all that surprising reality in the traditions that have networked most intimately with the geographic spaces that define where we live. The ethnographers have talked to the people who know these places. And they do the hard work of translation, of words, concepts and structural patterns. One of the most famous of these ethnographic writers was Ted Strehlow, whose Songs of Central Australia was a monument to translation of Arrernte traditions, something he could do because of his multilingual skills. The results were imperfect, they always will be, but nonetheless some very important aspects of central Australian poetics burst through into his texts.

Lilyin Songs from Cape Leveque In order to add something a little original to this material, I want to go to the producer of Indigenous oral literature with whom I worked, Paddy Roe, who lived in Broome, just up the road from the Mowanjum mob we looked at earlier (he has 18 works on AustLit.). Here I want to take the opportunity to reproduce and translate some songs that he, in turn, was reproducing and translating in June/July 1985. I said before that translation is quite a mystery. And I want to elaborate briefly on two senses of the word. The first is socio-linguistic, and here I call on the help of Naoki Sakai. Paddy Roe sang some songs which were composed by a Ngumbal woman some years before and then helped me render them in English. Paddy spoke a few traditional languages from around Broome, plus Broome English. I never got the impression, when he was talking about languages, that they were clearly delineated from one another. Rather they were ‘bordering’ on one another all the time.9 There was no one doing the nation-building work of separating languages off from one another, standardising and unifying them. Naoki Sakai rather cleverly shows that the unity of language is, in fact, a schematic, an effort of the imagination. No one ever experiences a language in all its unity, but what we do experience all the time are acts of



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translation. So, as he says, ‘Translation is anterior to the organic unity of language and . . . this unity is posited through the specific representation of translation.’10 We conventionally represent translation as bridging two languages, as a ‘communication model of equivalence and exchange’, but that is not what it is, it is a ‘form of political labour to create continuity at the elusive point of discontinuity in the social’.11 Paddy Roe was creating continuity within the political grouping of the people called ‘goolarabooloo’. This is not a ‘tribe’, since it is composed of different landholding groups speaking different languages. It is a kind of political confederacy unified by significant ceremonies and responsibility for sites up the coast from south of Broome to One Arm Point. Now, what happens when I join Paddy Roe and we translate into English? The political labour is now across another social discontinuity: Aboriginal regionality can now link to a putative Australian nation, and the songs could now impinge upon what we think is the representation of the national literature. Now, the second sense of translation, as I indicated before, is the Latourian one. Here, translation can be heterogeneous and cross different registers of reality, it is not just from word to word. Objects can be transformed and translated too. So, the most important relation in my work with Paddy Roe was not necessarily human-to-human. It was great that I met him and everything, but our relationships were always multiple and mediated in a multiple fashion. Our European-derived theories tend to privilege encounters between humans (the intersubjective) and encounters between humans and the so-called ‘world’: the subject–object relation. But what if the most important thing in our camp was my Sony cassette tape recorder? This is not just a helper for the inevitably more important human relationships, some ‘transparent intermediary’ as Graham Harman glosses Latour’s thought, ‘not some sycophantic eunuch fanning its [human] masters with palm leaves, but always does new work of its own to shape the translation of forces from one point of reality to the next’.12 The tape recorder created the capacity for me, and now us, to listen carefully. Listening carefully took the form of me, back at my desk, employing headphones and a stop-start replay device with a foot-pedal, while my fingers were creating a text on a typewriter. In the process this whole human-technical assemblage engendered a new style of writing. So, the aim is not to reduce the number of mediators, for instance with a narrow humanist view, but to marvel at how many there are, and to pay attention to their multiple effects. And the chain of mediations keeps going on; it doesn’t start with some unique human inspiration, nor stop at the other end of an imaginary line, with some output, like publication. So in 1985 the Sony tape recorder listened to some songs by Dorothea [durrudiya]. The material is ‘half Ngumbal’, Paddy Roe said, Dorothea

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herself being a ‘half-caste woman’, but she ‘could talk language’ and ‘died in [the] Native Hospital when it was still new’, so that would be about the 1960s.13 Ngumbal country is just south of a place called James Price Point, which is currently under threat of having a huge liquefied natural gas factory built there. Paddy Roe’s grandsons are engaged in trying to stop this industrialisation. I mention this political dimension because Paddy Roe could foresee at that time that whitefellas would try to take over the country he was entrusted to protect. It was the Jabirr Jabirr and Ngumbal peoples who had passed this country into the hands of Paddy and his daughters.14 What Paddy Roe was doing in getting me to record these songs was document his knowledge of the country and its language. So, that is a brief translation of the political context. Now to the songs: The first is a lilyin song, Dorothea singing, in the voice of the Karrkida (chicken hawk song): Mingalagan ngaya gudibirr ngumarla Follow me I am rubbish, long feathers wing marrgin hungry

karra buru ––– time

narraga dry wood/make a tune

Dandji- ma ngalama nimbirri-birri djin-ngi minyi Dance/when I was walking/dancing rolling head from side to side/full of grasshoppers Djarlil djarlil dja:rlil barna nawadja All tree/bush ?? Follow me, with my tail feathers all askew Hungry, time for supper, the wood is dry I dance as I go, my head rolls east and west, plenty of grasshoppers And bushes all around . . . Part II nilirrin djirri djinggi ngayu marda gigninya gets them in his beak, (alongside of me) holds them in claw, nibbles ganbardja balgarr ilinyi ngayu mirranngul never can catch me any more be prepared nanggandjarri djin wandi marda when I sit down by and by wanga bula djanu buru next time come follow me, you’ll get more grasshoppers



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ngangunda gunda manangarr Sorry you get no tucker [manangarr is an expression used for ‘break my heart’] I can hold them in my beak and claw, right close, and nibble I’m too quick for you, you’re not ready when I sit down by and by I’ll say, ‘Next time come follow me, you’ll get more grasshopper.’ Really sorry you missed out! This is followed by another lilyin song in the voice of a little boy ‘Moses’ [Nurdugun] from Carnot Bay. This is a song composed in the wirralburru season, in April, when there are the last storms before the long dry. Moses addresses the clouds: Lighting will come to you as you fly away Lightning will come to you, flash, lightning Everywhere it sparks off the clouds, rips and holes. Goodbye my country. And the third song I recorded that day is in the voice of a ship’s cat, on a pearling the boat called Salvador [djalbadjur], operating out of Beagle Bay.15 The boat was made in Beagle Bay by Nyul Nyul workers. Dorothea, the creator of the song, was a diver on that boat. ‘No gardiya’ [whitefellas], says Paddy Roe, ‘only naked divers, picking up two or four shells at a time’.16 The cat is called ngimbicat, and he is ‘growling’, telling Captain Augustine off: Keep that fire away, it’s too hot, I can’t eat the rice, it can wait. This cutter is sailing in today. Plates and cups rattling, I grab a knife, Got the saucepan, but just can’t get it out. I would if I could, but now it’s a mess. You see what I mean about the hard work of translation? Let me introduce another aspect of context. Lilyin songs are fun; people laugh as they sing them and listen to them. There is always going to be some kind of double meaning going on, otherwise no humour. So that is why, in the first song about the chicken hawk, bearing in mind it is a woman’s song, I risk eroticising the translation: ‘Follow me, with my tail feathers all askew.’

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Just to reinforce the idea that translation is not always about reducing the number of mediations or indeed ‘facilitating the transfer of meaning’, consider the following from Andreas Lommel, remembering fieldwork in the Kimberley in 1938: They, of course, taught the corroboree to others still roaming in the bush. I even met some Worora men months later in Broome who taught the corroboree for a fee to others who did not understand their language – this did not matter.

The poet made his songs in the language of his tribe, but, for rhythm and sentimental reasons, he changed the language so that some of his songs could not be translated.17 Now of course, lilyin songs are not the only literary genre in that part of the country. There is an oral narrative poetics, here illustrated by master storyteller Paddy Roe: just about towards morning – just about towards morning – tjipeee they hear-im – so they get ready these two bloke – (Soft) these two bloke get ready

he’s coming they can hear-im – somewhere here – (Laugh) they hear-im he’s comin’ back –

just about towards morning – just about towards morning – tjipeee they hear-im – he’s coming they can hear-im – somewhere here – (Laugh) they hear-im he’s comin’ back – so they get ready these two bloke – (Soft) these two bloke get ready

The mode of transcription brings out the patterns of repetition and elaboration. It is an exciting moment of the story, Paddy is slowing the pace before a moment of climax. He does this with the full repetition of two lines (each line is a breath group), plus two instances of chiasmus or cross-parallelism, plus a mimetic moment (the imitation of the call of the giant eagle djaringgalong), plus a moment of deixis, ‘somewhere here –’ reinforced with a laugh. As Stuart Cooke notes, ‘The story never stops moving, but Roe is still able to change his speed. The change of pace exerts a potent gathering power: overlapping and repeating phrases in such a way slows the story considerably, and draws the listener/reader closer with a seductive rhythm.’18 Alexis Wright, in Carpentaria, uses the same overlapping technique: Other things touched him too, and the madness went on and on . . . [paragraph break]On and on the floodwaters raced . . .19



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This supports, I hope, the argument that the work of Alexis Wright and Kim Scott, among others, assures continuity, not between the ancient and the modern, as if the break was always there to reassure whitefellas that their moment of intervention should always be marked, that real history began in 1788, but simply that there is continuity in the Great Tradition. I have suggested that this comes not so much through preservation of forms or contents, but through, for instance, the force of numbers: there was and is a lot of stuff out there. Dorothea could have had her book of song poetry if a researcher had gotten to her; Butcher Joe would have had his, if ethnomusicologist Ray Keogh had lived to publish his songs, his nurlu that he had recorded so lovingly and meticulously. Forces run through traditions, vitalising them. ‘Everything Stands up Alive’ as David Mowaljarlai says.20 It is an amodern, non-periodising vision of literary formations that follows the traces of energy across forms and through materials that are brought together sometimes fortuitously. A song-poem might find new life as a written text, sure, but it might fail in the translation. An archive might join forces with a narrative style and a visual cinematic language and the result is Rolf de Heer’s (2006) Ten Canoes. These forms and materials coexist, they are not lined up on a timeline of technological improvement, such that the printed word must always confirm while displacing the spoken, and so on. notes 1. Jerome Rothenberg, Pre-Faces & Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1981), 11. 2. Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1992). 3. ‘You don’t know where the contributions are going to come from, you have to exercise all your critical faculties to distinguish what’s genuinely interesting and new from what’s not, and the really interesting work may well come in a strange accent.’ Miriam Cosic, ‘Incandescent Ivor Indyk Turns Down the Heat’, The Australian, 26 February 2011, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/ incandescent-indyk-turns-down-the-heat/story-e6frg8n6-1226012001145. 4. Ibid. 5. David Mowaljarlai and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing Up Alive (Broome: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, 1993), 83. 6. Marcia Langton, ‘Certainty and Uncertainty: Aboriginal Studies as the Fulcrum of National Self-consciousness’, in First Peoples: Second chance, ed. Terry Smith (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1999), 39. 7. F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: George W. Stewart Publisher, 1948), 1. 8. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 26.

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9. Naoki Sakai, ‘How Do We Count a Language? Translation and Discontinuity’, Translation Studies 2.1 (2009): 83. 10. Ibid., 71. 11. Ibid., 72. 12. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2009), 15. 13. Stephen Muecke, field notebook, June/July 1985. 14. See accounts of this custodial handover in Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 1992), 101– 108; K. Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and P. Roe, Reading the Country (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984), 106–24. 15. The lugger San Salvador is mentioned several times in Mary Durack, The Rock and the Sand (London: Constable, 1969). 16. Stephen Muecke, field notebook, June/July 1985. 17. Andreas Lommel and David Mowaljarlai, ‘Shamanism in North-West Australia’, Oceania 64.4 (June 1994): 281. 18. Stuart Cooke, Speaking the Earth’s Languages: A Theory for a trans-Pacific Indigenous Poetics (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013), 48–49. 19. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo, 2006), 493. 20. Mowaljarlai and Malnic, Yorro Yorro.

Chapter 4

Can You Argue with the Honeysuckle?

Dingo and Kangaroo My father told me a story about a couple of swagmen; it must hark back to the Depression, something Dad remembers because he was a teenager then, living on a farm. He had to trap and eat a lot of rabbits in that dead-flat country of the South Australian Mallee. To this day, he still won’t eat rabbit. * * * Anyway, these two blokes are trudging along a track in the bush, and they pass a dead animal on the side of the track. A couple of miles further on, one of them says, ‘Dingo.’ A bit further down the road the other swagman joins in the conversation. ‘Kangaroo,’ he says. Later they camp for the night. In the morning only one man is left at the camp. By his bed, under a rock, is a note on a scrap of paper. It says, ‘Too much argument in this camp.’ * * * The Australian space we traverse has its arguments, they are immanent to the space itself: you cross into the badlands and the anger seeps out of the rocks and the ooze of drying waterholes. Or do we, in the narrowness of our vision, confine the argument just to the humans with their critical differences, as if it is only their hatred that matters, because they are the ones taking shots at each other from behind rocks or trees in this landscape, imaginary cowboys whose effects on that landscape last only as long as the bullet lines that cross 39

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it with a brief whistle and knock a chink out of a boulder, or the life out of a big red? The question is: Are the humans running the country, or vice versa? * * * In another story, Dingo and Kangaroo had an argument about who was here first. Dingo was fishing off the rocks at a beautiful beach; Kangaroo passed by going crabbing, and they glanced at each other and waved. Dingo, being a meat eater and feeling hungry because the fish weren’t biting, licked his lips and then felt guilty about wishing Kangaroo dead so he could rip out her flesh. Maybe Kangaroo sensed this necrophilia; she was used to Dingoes looking at her like that. Then, Kangaroo thought bugger it, that bloody Dingo is fishing in the wrong spot anyway! She turned back and fronted him. ‘This is my grandmother’s country, from this point right up to the creek over there. You can’t fish here, you got to talk to me first.’ Dingo takes a hard look at her. ‘Bullshit,’ and spits on the rocks. ‘It’s a free country.’ Free country. Well, well. There’s a phrase that you could take to the courts and the academies and turn it around and examine it from all sides: legal, political, historical, ecological. And, if these two part on bad terms, with their afternoons spoilt, there will still be things to sort out later. Kangaroo might have to prove continuous occupation of the country in front of the law in order to get the rights to the ancestral bit of beach (if she’s lucky). What does Dingo have to prove in order to keep fishing happily, without any uncomfortable thoughts lurking? Well, he might have to get a bit of philosophy and learn that there is no such thing as ‘free country’, that the concept of freedom itself has a particular Western history unknown, say, to Chinese or Aboriginal systems of thought, that today it is exploited to the limit by Western ideologues like George W. Bush. These two might have to be prepared to negotiate, even with absolutism in their positions, neither of them is an easy-going cultural relativist! The last thing I will give up, says Dingo, is my ‘freedom’ to fish here, while the other says that the last thing she will give up is her ancient heritage. But even with these kernels of absolutism in their positions, compromise can be reached, as we have seen in many settlements of this sort. The important thing, though, is the preparedness to negotiate, which depends on certain basic premises, the first being that your interlocutor is not a ‘barbarian’, ‘savage’ or ‘redneck’.



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So, the argument is not about temporal priority, whether Kangaroo or Dingo or whoever else was here first; it seems rather to be about practices of responsibility and ethics of engagement. Kangaroo does not say, ‘It is my ancient occupation of this place that gives me rights,’ nor does Dingo say, ‘It is my efficient modernity that gives me rights,’ as has been uttered so often in settler Australia, where historical time is emphasised, using ‘modern’ to exclude Aboriginal culture and people from contemporaneity. With Bruno Latour I would rather endorse an amodernity. The argument can be made that the criteria for membership of the Modern Club are typically invented by those already in it: ‘Have you had an industrial revolution? A humanist enlightenment? Do you have superior weapons and technology?’ The Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, South Asian and South American worlds have all put in a claim for alternative modern status by broadening the rules or by setting up their own clubs. I think in Australia it is sufficient to say that anyone who can invent ways of adapting to rapidly changing circumstances is modern; modernity need not be a periodising device, one that puts the ‘others’ always in a position of catching up, as Dipesh Chakrabarty says.1 Instead, amodernity is Latour’s way of saying let’s not judge or compare modernities, their differences after all are more a matter of the scale of technologies, technologies which in any case are the product of, and cannot function without, human beings and their inventiveness. Au lieu d’être . . . This suggestive elliptical phrase in French: Instead of being. In the place of being. To the place of existence. Into this new atemporal ‘space’ how then can one ‘be’ Australian, or ‘be’ Indigenous Australian; being Dingo or Kangaroo, what does that mean? The crucial and non-negotiable identity emerges in action, or out of inventive actions, or out of artful politics, it emerges only in movement. So, I want to define identity or being as agentive, ‘You are what you can do.’ Pervasive in Australian languages is the ergative syntactic construction, used to describe verbs whose actors do work, which when combined with an ‘eternal’ temporal marker, create continuous events (as in the song-poetry, something like: ‘spearing kangaroos forever in this place/in this place forever spearing’). Many Indo-European languages are classified as NominativeAccusative languages. That means that the subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs are marked in the same way, while the object of a transitive verb has a special ending (the accusative). In ergative languages (many Aboriginal languages, Basque and Tibetan), it is the agent of a transitive

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verb that is marked differently. The object of an action and the subject of an intransitive verb are treated the same. The point is that the agent of the transitive verb is seen to ‘work’; the event-creating transitive verbs have a specially marked subject. R. M. W. Dixon, in his Ergativity, makes the point that such grammatical differences are arbitrary and need not inscribe differing world views.2 Maybe so, but my point is more heuristic: a focus on the performative work of language leads us away from causes passing from subject to object to the idea of a subject working away at something. I don’t think an Indigenous philosophy of place would have anything to do with ontology, with the nature of the being of things. Reading Strehlow’s Aranda Traditions again, I don’t find the verb ‘to be’ telling us philosophical stories: the ancestor does not emerge from the chaos of the beginning of the world announcing portentously, ‘I Am’. This may have something to do with the fact that there is no radical separation of realms (Heaven/Earth) where God is always ‘in place’ up there; humans have to then explain their existence ‘down here’, and then that brief moment of human life is resolved and redeemed in a transcendental shift to the promised eternal life. I imagine this Indigenous Australian world to be only one, rather than one thus bifurcated, and one infinitely enriched by the powers of those multiple ancestors embodied in the landscapes and in the living things. Eternal life is in the reproduction of ancestor and totemic spirits in each individual born. It is not a future promise, a reward for ethical behaviour, it is an unavoidable birthright. Nor is there any evil path to be chosen, there is no dialectic, no separation of realms with a singular messiah figure as bridge. In writing his Aranda Traditions, in English, but with constant reference to Arrernte languages and myths, Strehlow creates a beautiful hybrid text. In a footnote, Strehlow makes explicit his poetic of assemblage, though he would probably prefer to think of his language as more transparent: ‘The following two paragraphs have been built up entirely from descriptive touches found in these Northern Aranda legends and their chant verses.’3 And at that point we read: At Tjoakana the great ntuiamba (honeysuckle) ancestor Ultinteraka is living, wearing a head-gear symbolical of the honeysuckle juice which courses in his veins. Around him grows a dense thicket of sweet-flowered honeysuckle trees. From the buds of these trees, and from the head-gear he is wearing, and from the ever-open veins of his own arms, the sweet black ntuiamba honey flows incessantly; it grows until it becomes a great river which begins to rush over the Burt Plain like a strong mountain torrent, uprooting shrubs and trees in its headlong race. This is the sweet black pmoara flood which finally overwhelms Karora and his sons at Ilbalintja.4

Ultinteraka is working away continually producing honey in this place. Instead of being, he does. In the place of his existence, an event is always



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happening. Does anyone have an argument with that? Presumably one can go to Tjoakana in Northern Arrernte country, with due permission, and have a look around and see if there are honeysuckle trees. That would be interesting, especially if there is a clan member to show you around, maybe enliven the place with song. This sweet place does not produce an argument about something; it produces life, like all the other Arrernte places in their singular ways. There is no argument because it is sustained by a poetics, by words, by song melody and rhythm, by the impact of dancing feet, by the flow of human blood in the ceremonies that pass responsibility for the place to the next generation. A poetics of a place can literally be bulldozed, if the honeysuckle trees are knocked down and the waterholes destroyed. Then, we do have an argument, one that risks forgetting about honeysuckle law and circles instead around efficiency and profitability vs. sustainability and human rights. How can one argue that the poetic is the crucial thing, in the way that it strongly expresses a law? The allies for honeysuckle law might find something in the concept of sustainability to work on, as an extension and a translation of the words and concepts in Northern Arrernte, in the feelings that come out of that place and are felt in the bodies of the custodians as they walk through there. The law of the honey is always there, it ‘flows incessantly’ in that place, unchanging. But because it is a life force, going out and increasing, and not closed in on itself (as if self-possessed), it has extensions of generosity to everything and everyone in its sovereign power. It will sustain other forms of life, some of which are yet to be created. See how it rushes over the Burt Plain like an unstoppable flood! Such unbelievable sweetness embracing the world! Notes 1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. R. M. W. Dixon, Ergativity (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 214–15. 3. T. G. H. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 36. 4. Ibid.

Part II

After Critique

Critique is not exactly what critics do for a living. Art critics and film critics write pieces that help guide our cultural consumption, and can be a pleasure to read in themselves. But critique involves a special kind of use of theory, ‘critical theory’, as in the Frankfurt School of cultural criticism, that involves coming to judgement via an elaborate path that pays attention to the object of critique, while elaborating a theoretical argument based on some significant absences, or negative spaces: what you don’t see, what has been unjustly neglected, what can be revealed, finally, as the necessary if provisional truth. As we shall see, it takes a special kind of person to do this tricky intellectual stuff. You have to train for years, a bit like olden-day seminarians. The comparison is motivated, because the theoretical critic feeds her or his disdain of ‘naïve realists’ by drawing down on something transcendent, a world to come in which we might be just a bit closer to revolution, emancipation, or at least novelty. Critique has its roots in the spiritual practices of religions that groom subjects to make prophetic utterances. Critique is powered by an engine on two cylinders: the promise of revealing hidden truths, and then, if we follow the right path, the promise of liberation. Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari did much to demolish the transcendent level by making ‘becomings’ minor and not centred on humans alone. Philosophical thought would not now be flowing out of institutions of higher learning to solve the world’s problems; problems would be immanent to encounters and events, and so philosophical language could now evolve with its objects as it learns from them. For me this line of thinking culminates in Bruno Latour’s plural ontologies, which these three pieces enact with specific applications in literary and cultural criticism.

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Motorcycles, Snails, Latour Criticism without Judgement

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms. —Michel Foucault1

The multiplication of ‘signs of existence’. And their invention sometimes. What a challenge! Foucault knew very well that judgement is practised all the time, that it is ‘one of the simplest things that mankind has been given to do’, yet his gift to us is a dream of some other activity for criticism. He was conscious, as we still are, that the practice of the humanities seminar, where students are trained to become certain kinds of subjects, focuses on the refinement of judgement, including the calibration of moral thresholds, the creation of taste and the development of an ear for tone. If students graduate from that seminar self-confident enough to judge what is true and beautiful, the tutor will have done – no doubt about it – an excellent job. Now, over twenty years later, Bruno Latour comes along with his criticism of critique. His ‘tone’ is satirical and his method ethnographic as he describes what happens in the very graduate school that delivers the kinds of critical moves needed for judging truth and beauty: 47

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Enter here, you poor folks. After arduous years of reading turgid prose, you will be always right, you will never be taken in any more; no one, no matter how powerful, will be able to accuse you of naïvité, that supreme sin, any longer? Better equipped than Zeus himself you rule alone, striking from above with the salvo of antifetishism in one hand and the solid causality of objectivity in the other. The only loser is the naïve believer, the great unwashed, always caught off balance. Is it so surprising, after all, that with such positions given to the object, the humanities have lost the hearts of their fellow citizens, that they had to retreat year after year, entrenching themselves always further in the narrow barracks left to them by more and more stingy deans? The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert.2

Both French writers owe something to Nietzsche, and indeed Antonin Artaud, in their elaborations of the violence of judgement and the arrogant righteousness of critique, coupled with a sneering disdain for mere facts. The genealogy of critical judgement can also be traced to the university model established by Immanuel Kant in early modern Europe when certain core values could still be fairly confidently asserted.3 Today, that Kantian Christian transcendentalism is no longer centre stage in a multicultural world where few such core values can be taken for granted, but must be negotiated, even in the micropolitics of the classroom. Rather than continue the criticism of critique directly, I will pursue instead an experiment with the experimental, an alternative thread in continental philosophy that seeks to provide (hopefully) a more realistic vision of collective assemblages of life forms, where the human (paradoxically for the humanities) finds itself less centred. It emerges from its roots in Spinoza, Bergson and Diderot, continues via Deleuze and Guattari, then William James and A. N. Whitehead, who have been revived in recent years. What do I mean by ‘experiment’? I define the concept in two ways, first by contrasting it to the practice of judgement in the writing of the kind of prose we call criticism. Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation. Judgement is enabled by such gaps, and we give them names like ‘critical distance’, ‘omniscient overview’, ‘hindsight’ or ‘perspective’.4 Knowing that forms of judgement are unavoidable, the move to the experimental attitude involves reflecting on the formation of such critical subjectivities. How does critical prose, of the kind that would judge, earn the right to its ‘critical distance’? By what steps does one get to this position of critique? By contrast, the experimental alternative is contingent and negotiable and prefers to ask how one earns the right to participate in the event – the seminar, the colloquium, the multidisciplinary research project. It should be clear that the experimental writing I envisage is not about breaking free of convention, but is actively engaged in creating assemblages



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or compositions as it goes along. This engagement may be with different registers of reality, because ‘the world’ is not seen as bifurcated, with the ‘text’ mediating the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’, as in older communication models.5 In this multirealist environment, writing cannot elevate the subject to a transcendent/romantic position, where human imagination ‘creates worlds’ so as to redeem a lost plenitude. Because of its constant imbrications or engagements, it seems to make more sense to support it with an immanent/vitalist conceptual architecture. John Rajchman’s position on Deleuzian philosophy summarises this difference, characterising Deleuze’s radical empiricism as an ‘empiricism that tries to push beyond judgment to an invention and an affirmation that precedes it – to that point where experimentation in philosophy becomes inseparable from vitalism’.6 So, I am catching on to the vitalist thread in contemporary philosophical thought from Bergson to the post-Deleuzians. And in the other hand I am holding a thread from Indigenous Australian thought, also vitalist, which taught me about ‘keeping things alive in their place’ to create a slogan.7 I want to see what these two threads can do for a writing practice and even a literary theory that are localised, rather than universal in aspiration. They constitute events performed in particular places. I speak of ‘keeping things alive in their place’ because it encapsulates what I have learnt from Aboriginal elders in Australia about the maintenance of cultures; authors like Paddy Roe, David Mowaljarlai and David Unaipon.8 For them, singing, dancing, writing or other forms of performance are not communicative items created for distribution. They are more like ecological events, existing more spatially than temporally; they have their roots in sacred country. And there are protocols of participation: Who is the ‘boss’ for this particular performance and how are rights to participation earned? Who can watch and listen? How are non-human things earning their rights to participate? Plants, animals and waterholes, but also other registers of reality like spirits, dreams and fictional beings. ‘Keeping things alive in their place’ is an a-modern vision. For if a modern genre like the detective story can become popular and spread around the world, thanks to mechanical reproduction and the reproductive machinery of capitalist organisation, that is a kind of networking that functions well, and precisely to transcend the specificity of place. But if one is more interested in cultural forms that have local coordinates, one might see them with their tendrils embedded ecologically, like roots from a seed. Does a seed have imperial ambitions, like the modernist commodity? Certainly, and weeds will take over the garden in their own unique ways of moving through their world. But they are limited by their resources, including the humans who chose what kind of culture they want to nurture. A second aspect of my experimental attitude involves speculation, and for me, that means asking about the reality of the relations between things,

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relations that are not dominated by the human experience of those things.9 That is a hard task, for how do you imagine the relation between a snail and the leaf it is eating (which is perfectly real as a relation) without anthropocentrism, without scientific reductionism, even without language? That’s one problem, especially pertinent for the field of ecological writing, conceived of as non-human centred (and therefore giving agency to non-humans), empirical and engaged in that contingent ongoing fashion described above. The sign says: ‘In my world home loans are flexible’. Catching a glimpse of the Citibank advertisement as I zip by. The guy looks, well, relaxed. ‘My world’, on the other hand, is in movement. I am riding a kind of work of art, a Kawasaki W650 re-created as a café racer by the Deus Ex Machina design concept workshop in Camperdown. A beautiful engine in the British twin style, but with the bevelled gear driving the overhead cam. It’s all silver and black; Daytona headlight and speedo, Nitrohead seat and Deus custom P-Nut aluminium tank. The speedo seems to read 10 per cent too slow. The tuned length ‘Up ’n’ Over’ scrambler pipes burble happily at low revs and ‘play Mantovani over 3000rpm’, as the writer down at Deus says. As rider, I could say that my ‘judgement’ in taking corners is ‘critical’, just to remind us of another way these words slumber in everyday usage. Is that all? No, my world is also something much more ancient and equally subtle. It is a machine-human assemblage where the machine itself, to be straddled by one or two people for rapid movement, seems to derive some of its form or capacities from the horse. Yet, this assemblage is based also on the ancient invention of the wheel, not only the two large ones, but the constellation of cogs and gears that play their own versions of Mantovani in the drive train. And the even more ancient material of its power, derived as it is from a refined essence of decayed and liquefied carboniferous rain forests from a much, much older world. A leaf fell from a dinosaur’s mouth into the river and that was the carbon in the explosion in the left cylinder of the W650 just now, just perhaps. There are pathways criss-crossing time and space from the ancient to the modern, making multiple pleats of time in the present, and I won’t go into any detail about the pathway of the evolution of the internal combustion engine, going back, the myth says, to James Watt sitting in his mother’s kitchen and noticing the rattle of the lid of the kettle. A transfer of vitality, but from what to what? Watt to whom? The prototype steam engine has power, so does Watt’s imagination, if you are asking yourself: Where does the power of steam come from, if you really want to trace it back? Then you can never be sure about the boundaries of material life. Doesn’t Mrs Watt’s mythical kettle also embody something imaginative to do with its initial creation and then its creative evolution? Don’t we then have to conceive of humans, non-humans and things



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as equally active agents operating on different registers? Could it be our task to describe the mediations? This is my world. Not the world of the guy whose happiness is flexible interest rates, or the other Citibank woman who says her world is a credit card that rewards her – and she has bright red shoes to prove it. Is my world the world of riding a motorcycle to work? Not really. If I have just demonstrated anything, it is that mine is a world of words, words that have this capacity to create pathways among different kinds of reality. Words, not language. Language, conceived of as ‘finding its conditions of possibility . . . in the purely apositive relations of the language system or code’,10 is of no interest, but words have historical contingencies and therefore capacities to jerk us around, surprise us as we wake up to some other kind of existence staring us in the face. Walter Benjamin spoke of ‘the tiny spark of contingency’, of the ‘here and now’, in a photograph, ‘with which reality has . . . seared the subject’.11 Likewise, etymological tracings are unique pathways zigzagging across worlds, as in this elaboration of the word ‘world’ itself: the English word ‘world’ comes from the Old English weorold (­uld), a compound of wer ‘man’ and eld ‘age’. Wer, as in were-wolf. World thus means roughly ‘Age of Man’. The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally ‘clean, elegant’, itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos ‘orderly arrangement’. While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a ‘domain of Man’, presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos.12 Multirealism Unique pathways in and among the multiply-real, then. In Bruno Latour’s huge metaphysical tome, On the Different Modes of Existence, we find him completely bypassing humanist phenomenology.13 Latour has wicked little digs at the phenomenological orthodoxy, caricaturing it as so metaphysically challenged that most philosophers don’t even need the fingers of one hand to be able to count the number of possible ways of ‘being in the world’. They recognise only two, the objective and the subjective. Everything they encounter is heading either to the status of the solid brick or towards that of ineffable human consciousness. But despite that, they love to announce that there is a ‘beyond subject and object’, or a ‘beyond nature and culture’. So, they arrive at finger number three, but have no idea what they are counting on it.14 In Latour’s more ecological multirealist philosophy, things can exist without being a function of the way humans look at the world, as if everything

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hung off that relationship. The Copernican Revolution may be over, when God was scientifically dethroned and Man became central, giving rise via the Enlightenment to the last few hundred years of secular humanism. Latour’s idea of admitting all sorts of ‘beings’ as actors is central to this new multirealism: an apple can be an actor, as can a breath of wind, a concept such as happiness or a person. Then they gather to form hybrid alliances, as in the way our domestic households function as a shifting set of alliances of humans, plants, animals and inanimate objects, forming relations all the time. In Latour’s philosophy, each actor is respectfully admitted into a democracy of such relations. One tries not to reduce one thing to being the effect of something else, in the manner that a sociology can reduce a religious experience to a set of structures and functions, or a religion can reduce AIDSpreventing condoms to a sin against human fertility. These sorts of reductions can, and are, made, more or less convincingly, but only through a series of hard-won negotiations and transformations from one link to another in a network of associations. Politics, unsurprisingly, lies in the relative strength or weakness of such alliances. If you want to prove that the earth moves around the sun, you’d better gather allies to your cause (telescopes, rational calculations, diagrams and influential friends and patrons) before the Inquisition, with the help of its allies, burns you at the stake. But from a philosophical point of view, the principle of ‘irreduction’, as Latour calls it, introduces politeness into the discussion for the first time in centuries, as Latour’s ‘multi-naturalism’ urges us to respect different modes of existence. So, Latour has to take off one sock to count his modes of existence; there may be up to fourteen in various combinations in his system. If you are used to philosophers thumping on tables or pointing at glasses of water when they want to evoke the real, then this can no longer happen with him. There are no primary, more solid realities followed up by secondary effects like subtle feelings or meanings. Rather, everything is real, and it is approached with a rigorously empirical and experimental attitude. This means that everything is a work in progress as a negotiable alliance of things. A religious ceremony can attain its desired reality as a mode of religious existence through the alliance of all that is needed: a congregation and a representative of God, sacred words, artefacts and icons, music, the smell of incense. It is a work in progress because of the ongoing effort; if its reality were given in advance, it would reduce to dogma and have the same kind of existence as other forms of dogma. Since the Enlightenment, humans have stopped seeing themselves as God’s pale creatures and became central to their own thought. But in Latour’s scheme, the human has no special mode of existence, and so in this it differs markedly from humanist philosophies that work so hard at maintaining the



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human/non-human divide. In his political ecology, humans are not central. We are, after all, only a couple of chromosomes away from chimpanzees. But living things as a whole class reproduce, so reproduction is one of his many modes of existence, and I want to link it to vitality a bit later on.15

Object-Oriented Writing It seems too naïve to ask, but how do you break out of the formula, ‘I am interpreting the world’? We might assert two things first of all as premises: (1) there is no line of communication between subject and object and (2) along that fictional line between subject and objects there would be no gaps, metaphysical voids or in-between spaces to get lyrical about. The conceptual image a lot of us share now is more along the lines of a network of shifting relations sustaining a range of delicate existences. So then we might experiment in this direction with something I am calling object-oriented writing,16 for which the slogan is, ‘let the object talk to the writing’ – without worrying too much about defining the object, this move in the experiment is heuristic – it is about respecting the strangeness, as anthropologist Mick Taussig says: It is more like having the reality depicted turn back on the writing, rather than on the writer, and ask for a fair shake. ‘What have you learned?’ the reality asks of the writing. ‘What remains as an excess that can’t be assimilated and what are you going to do with the gift that I bestow, I who am such strange stuff?’17

In Creative Evolution, Bergson says, ‘The idea that for a new object we might have to create a new concept, perhaps a new method of thinking, is deeply repugnant to us.’18 This is because we have our carefully constructed macro systems, deduced from describable micro elements. But the ‘strange stuff’ talking to the writing; this is suggesting to me a slogan like respect the signature of the thing. A wonderful object will feel let down if you write something boring about it, something that reduces it to macro principles [Newton’s laws of motion], or gets lost in the micro detail (it is largely made up of carbon atoms). Isabelle Stengers offers a way out with what she calls the meso level. She might ask, ‘What is the character of the motorcycle?’ ‘What makes the tyres stick to the road as it leans fast into a corner?’ There are (macro) Newtonian answers, just as there are (micro) answers about the temperature of rubber molecules. But the meso level is what the head Kawasaki mechanic knows about a certain race-bred model and how it will respond at the Phillip Island track in the rain. It is the mechanic’s feeling for the character of the machine that the driver trusts when he switches tyres. It’s all about keeping things alive in particular places.

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What? Things Are Alive? Not just keeping the motorcycle racer alive, but possibly the culture of motorcycle sports which depends on a whole bunch of affective relations. The love of the thing. Multiple connections enhance the life of the machine; it is a complex object which, like anything that is not an atom, is composed, and keeps on being composed, built on, by those who participate in its life. So now, with the help of Bruno Latour, I want to think about objects like motorcycles (or humans or snails) as animated in their multiple connections, carefully forged and nurtured, rather than following the materialist orthodoxy: One of the principal causes of the scorn poured by the Moderns on the sixteenth century is that those poor archaic folks, who had the misfortune of living on the wrong side of the ‘epistemological break’, believed in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimate matter producing its effects only through the power of its causes. This conceit has the strange result of composing the world with long concatenations of causes and effects where (this is what is so odd) nothing is supposed to happen, except, probably at the beginning – but since there is no God in those staunchly secular versions, there is not even a beginning. . . . The disappearance of agency in the so called ‘materialist world view’ is a stunning invention especially since it is contradicted every step of the way by the odd resistance of reality: every consequence adds slightly to the cause. Thus, it has to have some sort of agency.19

So, what is the consequence of this animist attitude that runs the risk of sounding New Age-ish? It makes me write differently for a start. I approach the machine bearing the name of god with trepidation and with affection. In the background is a memory, from years ago, of bringing home a 1939 Velocette MAC350. I started it up and it roared into life. But the carburettor was jammed. I tried to shut it down by putting it into gear, but it went wild in the garden, churning up my mother’s asparagus patch, before I finally subdued it. Today, the life of the Deus depends in part on another woman, my partner, Patience, who says, ‘I’m telling you now, I’ll not be visiting you in hospital, so take care.’ The object engenders life, like a pebble always creating ripples in its place, spreading out and engaging other beings and other worlds. Its life also depends on the kind of mythology it carries, its deep historical meanings that, in turn, engender affect and sense. What kinds of human dreams are there in the story, composing all this material into wondrous speeding contrivances? So, the animist attitude is compositionist to the extent that it acknowledges the agency of all the elements of the composition. Yet, our secular materialism tells us that we can’t mix dreams with memories, with speculations about the origins of petrol in prehistoric rainforests. It urges us to treat things as if they were all dead. This is the same materialism that tries to maintain a strict



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ranking of importance of actors in a reality as complex and as interrelated as ‘the economy’. For which, the ‘bottom line’ is, what? Exchange value? Resource wealth? In relation to that mightily powerful set of stories and rituals we call the Economy, we also have to bring ‘trust’, ‘investor confidence’, fantastic arrays of numbers, not to mention a certain type of office décor, suit and haircut to inspire that same ‘investor confidence’. Then there is an advertising campaign to mobilise our desires for home, as Citibank urges us to take out a flexible loan and forget the sub-prime catastrophe. It is taking up a multirealist embrace that is the issue here. For us humans, that means writing the multirealist experience, something we who have ‘been there’ can try to report on even as we create it. Our reports ‘from the field’ try not to be reductions to one level of reality (the experience of the motorcycle reduced to the signs and functions of the strictly materialist language of, say, mechanical engineering or of sociology; that is, a purely referential language), but reports that envelop the poetry, the sensorium, the history, the mythology and the politics. The whole damn culture in other words. What kind of energy does this culturally composed world run on, for it is not the machine of knowledge accumulation or the combustion engine of critique (which Latour famously described as ‘running out of steam’). In the humanities, critique is the engine of debunking, revealing or unmasking the reality that lies behind mere appearances: Critique, in other words, has all the limits of utopia: it relies on the certainty of the world beyond this word. By contrast, for composition, there is no world of beyond. It is all about immanence. The difference is not moot, because what can be critiqued cannot be composed. It is really a mundane question of having the right tools for the right job. With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but not repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw.20

So, what will keep the compositional machine going? This writing machine that is neither interpreting the world nor denouncing its false appearances? What will give life to words? The same thing, I argue, that gives life to other things; the capacity to reproduce; reproduce, that is, with carefully chosen partners.

Reproduction and Reading In 1979, literary and cultural theorist Tony Bennett had the insight that if ‘production is completed only with consumption, then, so far as literary texts are concerned, their production is never completed. They are endlessly

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re-produced, endlessly remade with different political consequences and effects’.21 To this important insight about intertextual effects, we can attempt to flesh out the multimodal or multirealist networks that intersect in a writing or reading event in order to ask how the literary text is keeping itself alive in its place(s), how it is reproducing itself and its culture. Latour insists that there are ontologically different modes of existence involved in any event. ‘Reference’ is about the chains along which knowledge is transferred, whereas ‘reproduction’ is about something else: The world of ‘matter’, [Nature] is made of at least two entirely different layers of meaning: one consists of the ways in which reference chains need to be arrayed so as to work, by giving us knowledge of far away entities and processes of all kinds; but the other is provided by a completely different kind of mode, and that is the ways in which the entities themselves manage to stay in existence. Having called the first reference, I will call this second reproduction. . . . These two contrasts, or to call them by a more ontological term, these two modes of existence, have been constantly confused by modernism, but this confusion does not need to continue with ecology.22

Unlike motorcycles, reproduction tends to go at a snail’s pace, depending on, I guess, what the speedo is connected to. In ‘The Snail Watcher’, a short story by Patricia Highsmith, a bunch of snails gets seriously out of control.23 This is how the story goes: One evening in his kitchen, Peter Knoppert, a mild-mannered stock broker, is observing some snails in a bowl. They are destined for the dinner table, but he is drawn further into observation, and then fascination, as he attends to the languid lovemaking of a pair of snails. (These hermaphroditic creatures reproduce by inseminating each other over a period of two to twelve hours.) Knoppert loses his appetite, gains another, becomes obsessed with his snails; he saves them from the pot and takes them to his library, where he is delighted by their prolific fertility. He does research in the local library, where he finds a sentence from Darwin’s Origin of Species. . . . The sentence was in French, a language Mr. Knoppert did not know, but the word sensualité made him tense like a bloodhound that has suddenly found its scent. . . . Snails manifested a sensuality in their mating that was not to be found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. (5)

This key word sensuality drives not only a story but also a kind of contemporary cultural theory, embracing affect. How could we not say that the perceived ‘sensuality’ of snails is worthy of knowledge and respect? That it reproduces knowledge and respect? Otherwise, we reduce the life of snails to the language of reference, where only object-relations can move them, and move their relations to us.



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By now, there are hundreds of snails in his room at home, he disappears of an evening to be with them. His wife is concerned with this obsession, but it seems to make him happy, even at work: His colleagues in the brokerage office noticed a new zest for life in Peter Knoppert. He became more daring in his moves, more brilliant in his calculations, became in fact a little vicious in his schemes, but he brought money in for his company. By unanimous vote his basic salary was raised from forty to sixty thousand dollars per year. When anyone congratulated him on his achievements, Mr. Knoppert gave all the credit to his snails and the beneficial relaxation he derived from watching them. (7)

But the fertility of the snails becomes heavy and sinister, leading to the death of Knoppert. As he succumbs beneath the weight of snails in his room, he sees a pot plant: ‘A pair of snails were quietly making love in it. And right beside them, tiny snails as pure as dewdrops were emerging from a pit like an infinite army into their widening world’ (10). And that is the end of the story. My story is a summary of a piece of literature, and of course it illustrates my reproduction theme. I want to argue that literary works reproduce like snails, like living things, given the right conditions. They have to be provided with a culture, which includes a certain devotion, like Knoppert’s devotion to his snails. This will involve conceiving literature as something that is always in the process of being made and thus can fail to be made, to be ‘instaured’, a curious word that Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers found in Etienne Souriau. Stengers says, ‘I like Etienne Souriau’s concept of “instauration” (establishment, institution) very much because, as regards the artist at work, it deploys a quite fabulous assemblage denying any power to the old conflict between determination and freedom.’24 But what does she mean by that? Patricia Highsmith, in a literary experiment, created a character whose devotion to snails changed the form of his life, and theirs. He became more than human and gained vitality; they became more than snail and more sinister. These fictional beings cross two distinct modes of existence, the fictional and the reproductive. Strange, isn’t it, that characters in novels are rarely talked about as being ‘fictional beings’, as if their existence were created and maintained in a genuine ontological difference. More often, critics labour to link them to contexts, to real human beings they are ‘loosely based on’ vaguely ‘reflecting’ and so on, all because of the poverty of the subject–object polarity (the two concepts like hooks, Latour jokes, to suspend the hammock destined for philosophical snoozing).25 A special kind of existence has to be coaxed into being by writers of fiction; it doesn’t arrive without considerable labour. Likewise with the readers. They approach fictional beings with enough devotion to sustain the latter’s existence. What is going on in this

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complex web, creating and maintaining the delicate existence of fictional beings? Characters like Madame Bovary or Mickey Mouse, immortal beings, or a person like the US president, who starts off as a being with a reproductive existence, then, as he becomes an object of knowledge, a referential existence, then finally he acquires a fictional existence as well, once the mythmaking work is done to invent him as a character. The work of art is mechanically reproduced, as we know, but so too must be the vitality that sustains the immortal beings who hover around the page of fiction. While a literary text, as an object, is not ‘alive’, its existence is defined through its active relations with other things, human and non-human, in a complex ecology. The capacity of a writing to ‘live’ is engendered neither by the life of the writer nor by any felicitous fit that the writing, as representation, may have with a world. Neither freedom nor determination, as I think Stengers was saying. It is through its capacity to form new relations: writing with rather than writing about. Writing down words in such a way that they ‘enter into new partnerships’, as they say. Peter Knoppert’s snail-becoming is a successful inter-species literary experiment that needs just this singular character to manifest itself in its sudden accomplishment. It is something that a piece of straight prose, a ‘report to the academy’, cannot do, because it exists only in a referential existential register, rather than a reproductive one. Now the generic seed is sown, you too can create another Knoppert character, this time with, say, dragonflies. Now what does the reader do to help sustain this literary life? In reading a text, one creates one’s own instaurations, by bringing characters ‘to life’ for instance. This ancient Leavisite category of Life can be revived and retheorised. It will not be a question of applying a reductive reading, a Marxist reading or reading ‘with Butler’ as students are wont to say. These are class exercises, not the kind of regular everyday imaginative readings that read Blake as Blake, if you like, without being drowned out by Marx’s voice. My analytic method will now ask two questions of the text: How is it keeping itself alive in its place? (I am refusing there the modernist universalisms that suggest works of art are ungrounded, that they ‘transcend’ time and place.) And the second question I ask is: What are its partners for reproductive purposes? At this point, ‘the Marxist reading’ can be brought back as a partnership, not as a reduction. Or the offer to read ‘with Butler’ is an invitation to go on a date: I can’t take this story out clubbing just by myself, I need another highly desirable partner as well. Two things then: place-based devotion or cultivation, and no reproduction without getting partners to come to the party. And of course in the ecology of the literary event there are all sorts of partnerships: a comfortable armchair, Coleridge’s tranquillity, not to mention knowledge and training in certain sorts of affect acquisition. Or in the college ecology, literary events have a different mix sustaining the literary life.26



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The critical prose I have ‘reproduced’ about ‘The Snail Watcher’ attempts to retain the multidimensionality of fiction by animating Highsmith’s story (as object) into a system of reproduction that can be generalised across various ecologies, including the events of dissemination and teaching. It holds back from judgement as a sovereign capacity (the always threatening, arbitrary and sudden ‘judgement of God’). It would prefer, without yet fully realising it, a sustained argument or negotiation that gathers allies (co-workers) around a ‘matter of concern’ in order to build something, to compose a text or a corpus of texts. Additional questions for this matter of concern would include: What makes the literary text multirealist? How powerful is (the imagination of) non-human agency in such texts? If there is to be a criticism without judgement, then it should avoid that transcendentalism that insists on the incompleteness of the text, its paradoxes and ambivalences so that only in the transcendental move (demonstrated as an intellectual striving by the student) can an elusive infinite unity be glimpsed for a brief rewarding moment. Rather, the radically empirical procedure simply provides formulae for composition within a historically and empirically given tradition, with which the student can experiment to see if they work. Criticism in this context is not (of course) ‘saying what is wrong with things’, or in a more sophisticated fashion calibrating moral thresholds, classifying and judging, and setting ‘standards’. It is not about cultivating openness (or celebrating gaps and indeterminacies). It is, on the contrary, about real relations (which may be speculative), and robust pragmatic connections across an array of different modes of existence. Many of these critical reformulations derive from Ian Hunter’s work, which to some may look like he is supporting the status quo by failing to accede to the dialectic of history27 and thus welcome ‘breakthrough phenomena’.28 In fact, he argues that newness is more likely to come into the world through ‘protracted hand-to-hand intellectual battles’29 than it is by cultivating an intellectual persona who performs the rhetoric of an openness to novelties that are more likely to be metaphysically infinite than specific. Criticism without Judgement Having made this excursion via literary theory to recover the concept of Life, barely, I want to finish with a couple of reflections on making a genre like fictocriticism do the experimental and compositional work I have outlined. What can fictocritical writing do that regular essays or stories can’t? Unlike the critical piece, it forestalls judgement in the necessary temporality of its performance. Unlike the short story, its ‘problem’ is external to it: something comes from outside the literary field and disrupts the usual pattern for

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the genre. An example: an archaeologist friend, Denis Byrne, living in Bali and disturbed by not being able to find objective evidence about the 1965 massacres anywhere on the island, starts to dig for layers of affect in his negotiations with people and things, and these find their writerly correlates in ‘Traces of ’65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali’,30 so his new affective material changes his writing to the point where the objective is no longer self-evident and has to be speculated about, yet still quite realistically.31 It is a writing constantly partnered by what is at stake for my friend: the political pressure of the ghosts of the dead haunting the text and thus haunting the discipline of archaeology. Interruptions from outside the given discipline or field, then, are the taps on the shoulder that force the writing to write with new partners. I’m not sure if I can claim that this willingness to form new and often unlikely partnerships makes fictocriticism a lively genre, perhaps merely mischievous. I think it offers a way out of that familiar conceptual architecture that has had us ‘interpreting the world’ and building up critical authority in the process. Now we negotiate, more politely perhaps, with stakeholders in matters of concern, some of whom are non-human. Our literary events are just that, rather than items of communication, and they have to be performed in the writing and in the reading. And if they have a life, it is not a life that they have on their own. The first great Aboriginal writer and scholar, David Unaipon, wrote something back in the 1920s that I will ponder forever. He was talking about a certain green frog and how its life depended on the Water Spirit: ‘Everything that exists has some life apart from itself,’ he said. And this Water Spirit, he added, is ‘the most multiple spirit of all’.32 Of course it is, it has all these lives to sustain in their places, and these existences include beings constituted in dreams, plants, animals, humans and their different cultures. The real challenge for making genres, I think, will be just how to use writing to trace pathways among multiple realities that affirm their own separate, but mutually sustaining, existences. To do this, one must experiment, speculate with new relations among things and earn participation before judging. When writing moves against alterity, creating the friction and heat of work, it rarely finds a liberation from constraint, as if the experiment would ‘open up new spaces’ as critical utopianism would have it. Rather, I think, experiments are the transfer of a technology, like writing, to worlds which may not even have writing, and where the protocols are strange and compelling.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault, [1980]. ‘The Masked Philosopher’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 1,



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ed. J. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1997), 321–8. 2. Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 239. 3. Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 78–112. 4. On ‘critical proximity’, see Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (London: Sage, 2006) and uptakes by Katrina Schlunke, ‘Captain Cook Chased a Chook’, Cultural Studies Review 14.1 (2008): 43–54 and Jane Simon, ‘Critical Proximity’, Cultural Studies Review 16.2 (2010): 4–23. 5. Stephen Muecke, ‘Public Thinking, Public Feeling: Research Tools for Creative Writing’, TEXT 14.1 (2010), http://www.textjournal.com.au. 6. John Rajchman, ‘Experiment’, in The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 27. 7. Stephen Muecke, Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: University of NSW Press, 2004), 34. 8. Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1996); David Mowaljarlai, with Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro: Everything Standing up Alive: Spirit of the Kimberley (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 1993); David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). 9. The critique of ‘correlationism’ as a dominant form of humanist phenomenology can be found in Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London: Continuum, 2008). For a related discussion of speculative realism, see the journal Collapse 3, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007); and Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (Ropley: Zero Books, 2010). 10. Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, 91. 11. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London [1931] 1979, 243. 12. Adapted from the OED entry. 13. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 14. Bruno Latour, ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence’, in The Speculative Turn, trans. S. Muecke, ed. Graham Harman, Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 304–33. 15. Much of this section is adapted from my own ‘Beyond The Eye of the Beholder’, review of Graham Harman, Prince of Networks, Australian Literary Review, 3 March 2010, 6–7. 16. See also Graham Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy’ in the publications cited. 17. Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), vii–viii. 18. Bergson, Creative Evolution [1913], quoted in Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010), 2. 19. Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at Writing a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, New Literary History 41 (2010): 471–90, 481–2.

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20. Ibid., 475. 21. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), 136. My emphasis. Thanks to John Frow for reminding me of this quotation. 22. Bruno Latour, ‘Will Non-Humans be Saved? An Argument on Ecotheology’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (2009): 459–75, 466. 23. Patricia Highsmith, ‘The Snail Watcher’, in Patricia Highsmith, Eleven (London: Heinemann, 1970), 1–10. Further references are included in the text. 24. ‘History through the Middle: Between Macro and Mesopolitics, Interview with Isabelle Stengers’, Inflexions 3, http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/node_i3/ stengers_en_inflexions_vol03.html. 25. Latour, ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’, 309. 26. Stephen Muecke, ‘The Writing Laboratory: Political Ecology, Labour, Experiment’, Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 5–20. 27. Fredric Jameson, ‘How Not to Historicize Theory’, Critical Inquiry 34.3 (2008): 563–82. 28. Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, 81. 29. Ibid., 103. 30. Denis Byrne, ‘Traces of ‘65: Sites and Memories of the Post-Coup Killings in Bali’, UTS Review 5.1 (1999): 37–52. 31. ‘Speculative realism’ means ‘a realism dedicated to overthrowing the prejudices of common sense’. Graham Harman, personal communication, Tuesday 8 March 2011. 32. Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, 53.

Chapter 6

Reproductive Aesthetics Multiple Realities in a Seamus Heaney Poem

The networks of reproduction are too speculative to interest anyone but the most seasoned metaphysicians and a select few poets.1 —Bruno Latour

In Paris, on a warm summer night, you can join the tourists in observing a remarkably eccentric poet with all his complex apparatus on the Pont Saint Louis, the little bridge that joins the two islands in the Seine. He stands there declaiming, surrounded by things sprouting from his large cart: texts and slogans on sticks and boards, fairy lights illuminating the whole scene with their cool LED glow, a CD player with background music. He will conclude by spruiking and selling you his own CD and texts. Now, that’s what I call poetry, poetry going about its eccentric, singular business, being an embarrassment (to real poets), creating a scene. It is an event pulling in so much more than the author–text–reader triangle to which we are wont to reduce the practice of poetry. What, I will urge us to wonder in this chapter, are all the heterogeneous things that make a poem come into existence and then help it to stay alive? I want to explore this question with the Latourian concept of reproduction, for which I need another example. Earlier this year, my friend Toby Miller updated his status with ‘White Yanqui parthenogenesis’ on that most social of social media, Facebook, in reference to an LA Times article, ‘Oscar voters overwhelmingly white, male.’2 Could this support my hypothesis that cultural life is engendered via reproductive technologies? People who vote at the Academy Awards, it seems, have for years been reproducing ‘white, male’ culture (however reductive that may sound) with their power to rank films. And this reproduction would be parthenogenetic because they do it all by themselves, like earthworms, without the need for partners of a different sexuality or race, nor, it is implied, of a different culture. 63

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Such an argument depends on the acceptance of the idea that reproduction is not ‘simply’ biological. The biology of sexual reproduction is immensely complex and, of course, outside the scope of this chapter. Scientific line diagrams that purport to represent complex biochemical structures like ribonucleic acid (RNA), a macromolecule essential to reproduction, fail to represent all the complexities involved, along with the associations with DNA and other proteins. It is a two-dimensional approximation in the same way that basic chemistry is taught with large colourful spheres connected with rods. Nonetheless such approximations serve to illustrate the complexity of heterogeneous associations at the heart of any kind of reproduction, sexual-biological or bio-cultural. Sexual reproduction can never be purely biological, which means that it cannot be apprehended purely scientifically, through the methods of the disciplines of biology or biochemistry. Leaving aside the fact that biology’s procedures, the conditions of existence of that discipline (including methods and technologies, funding bodies, institutions, peer review, contingencies of various sorts), are themselves heterogeneous, it is also the case that animals’ reproductive capacities are necessarily linked to the complexities of context – seasons, scents, moods, social pressures, communication and culture – to the point where we cannot deny humans’ specific stimulation by bouquets of flowers or bouquets of words. Hence our interest here is in lyric poetry’s own conditions of reproduction, or, to put it another way, its form of (continued) existence. Poetry is one of the many ways in which humans foster an interest in each other; the interest in reproduction, we might say, involves the reproduction of interest. In Formalism and Marxism, Tony Bennett said, ‘If production is completed only with consumption, then, so far as literary texts are concerned, their production is never completed. They are endlessly re-produced, endlessly remade with different political consequences and effects.’3 At the time, Bennett’s emphasis was largely intertextual, but the politics of literature that he underscores points to a ‘context’ that this discussion will seek to elaborate. Context often remains undertheorised to the extent that it is seen as the realworld background against which texts play out their variations. This would be the one world, the one reality, the same one perceived by scientists and sociologists; in fact, their referential knowledge is often used in literary analysis. With the help of Bruno Latour, I want to suggest that this context is, in fact, ontologically plural.4 There are several worlds: technical ones, referential ones, fictional ones, religious ones and reproductive ones, to mention just a few. They interact with each other without necessarily, or always, going by way of the human perception of the interaction. This throws up the challenge of trying to understand them without such a phenomenological and correlational reduction5; there are ways in which a leaf ‘understands’ the sun and the gases in the atmosphere, or the car tire ‘understands’ the bitumen surface of the road,



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that are supremely indifferent to human presence. We would have to try to find a language that speaks to those relations on their own terms, without the kind of categorical errors we seem to perform all the time: photosynthesis is a scientific issue belonging to the ‘objective’ world of reference, right? Why, then, is it so readily made a ‘subjective’ moral issue as a part of climate change debates? What is the chain of associations that might link these two different modes of existence, the referential and the moral? What remarkably strange ways we humans have of immersing ourselves in quite different worlds, assuming an omniscient point of view, as if with a little effort the English language could come to grips with, and be a bridge over, just about everything. Aesthetic objects also have modes of existence that can be understood on their own terms, that is, with the unique sets of relations that they establish with other things, other worlds, other humans and so on. Their peculiarity is in their relations, perhaps more than as things in themselves, though Graham Harman debates Latour on this point in the second half of Prince of Networks, followed recently by articles by himself and Timothy Morton in New Literary History.6 For the proponents of object-oriented philosophy, like Harman, objects have some essential qualities independent of their relations, yet they are not fixed objects either; they are ‘mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible only through oblique allusion’ (188). From this position he sets out a limited defence of Cleanth Brooks’ (New Critical) autonomy of the poetical text, which like any other object ‘runs deeper than any coherent meaning’ (200). Harman concludes his article in a grand flourish of theoretical utopianism: that this resistant impenetrability of the text objects will assist object-oriented philosophy in its ‘new’ and ‘liberating’ mission. Rather than this conclusion, where Harman registers his ‘hope’ for a new theory, I prefer his earlier point: ‘What is truly interesting about “contexts” is not that they utterly define every entity to the core, but that they open a space where certain interactions and effects can take place and not others’ (191). Rather than making his essentialism of objects carry the eventual burden of aesthetic profundity and theoretical liberation at the same time (an echo of a long-lasting Kantian theological transcendentalism), I prefer a totally superficial description (unburdened by ‘profundity’ as well as any hope of liberation or innovation) of the links both inside and outside a poem, where these specific relations can be seen to extend in transformative chains across different registers of reality, not just from text to text, but text to body, to object, to concepts, to feelings and even to ‘atmospheres’ or ‘tones’. We can experience a poem as we listen to it or read it, and this experience in some ways is both an experience of the poem ‘itself’ and also an experience of its relations; the relations are as real as the thing, as Whitehead asserts.7 To offer a multirealist reading is to demonstrate that this very experience is not always reducible to

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human experience. Another way of putting this is to say that the poem has necessary partnerships with virtual humans, things, other texts, history and even the sacred. This is a difficult point to accept for those ‘correlationists’ or phenomenological humanists who follow the orthodoxy that everything in a poem can only be understood via human experience. But if it is true, as objectoriented ontology claims, that an object is never fully present to itself and manifests in different ways for different other items of reality (wind is different for a sailing boat than it is for a scientist), then the poem–thing relation can take on a causal specificity.8 A spade should be able to relate to a poem differently to the way it relates to you or me, as in the well-known Heaney poem, a clean rasping sound
 When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging . . .9 Sorry, I can’t produce a ‘bright edge’ spade to compare to the ‘the one in the poem’, nor do I want to claim that the poem ‘captures’ the deeper essence of spade. Such a tool simply and superficially manifests in relation to the poem in ways differently to the way it does to me when I do a bit of my own digging. For a start, the poem’s spade has the features of not being a pen, and of relating to an earlier Irish potato-digging generation. It is specific in its causal relations. So what, you may ask, is the advantage in retreating from human centrality in poetic experience – to claim that a poem and a spade might vitalise each other without the human interpretation ready at hand? It is almost the same claim we might make about a blackberry and a cockatoo vitalising each other, but with poetry, isn’t there always devilish language getting in the way, triangulating and threatening to make English speakers, in this case, the centre of everything? In order to say no, I have to elaborate the claim that some poetic relations are not linguistic. Mine is not the moral eco-critical claim that all sorts of non-humans deserve a place in the sun, or that Heaney’s concern for spuds is ecological. It is actually a cosmic claim in the sense of Stengers’ Cosmopolitics.10 It is that ‘Heaney’s world’, as we used to say so formulaically about any author, is not just his, but is an ontologically plural world that includes ‘Heaney’, in one corner, as well as all sorts of other things that respond to other kinds of realities. This constructivist approach suggests that attention to spades, spuds, mirth and imperialism offers more to aesthetics, rather than less, when those things are seen as animating life as much as us humans. And from the point of view of the process of creation, it suggests that the poem is a kind of channel for all those things coming together in a composition. And I suspect that the composition, in this plural sense, is facilitated by Heaney’s loving attitude, dispensed equally for the purposes of the poem, among the spade, his father and the spuds.



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Let’s continue to read a different Seamus Heaney poem with this kind of ontological plurality in mind.

Fosterage For Michael McLaverty
 ‘Description is revelation!’ Royal
 Avenue, Belfast, 1962,
 A Saturday afternoon, glad to meet
 Me, newly cubbed in language, he gripped
 My elbow. ‘Listen. Go your own way.
 Do your own work. Remember Katherine Mansfield – I will tell How the laundry basket squeaked . . . that note of exile.’
 But to hell with overstating it:
‘Don’t have your veins bulging in your biro.’
 And then, ‘Poor Hopkins!’ I have the Journals
 He gave me, underlined, his buckled self
 Obeisant to their pain. He discerned
 The lineaments of patience everywhere
 And fostered me and sent me out, with words Imposing on my tongue like obols.11 My choice of ‘Fosterage’ is not innocent, its title alluding to adoption, care and mentoring. It is about the ‘schooling’ of the poet (it is number five in the six-part sequence of related lyrics titled ‘Singing School’). I want also to make the case that as readers we ‘foster’ poetry in our reading of it, and that we do this by following the chains of associations that occur both in the mind and across worlds. The poem is dedicated to Irish novelist Michael McLaverty, who was the Headmaster of St. Thomas Intermediate School, Belfast, when Heaney taught there in 1962–1963.12 Jonathan Allison has done considerable work on the poem, picking up the intertextual links, through the titles of the series and of this poem. He noted a Yeatsian commitment to study as part of the poet’s vocation, hence the title of the series, that Allison finds in Yeats: Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence He also finds the title of our poem in Wordsworth’s The Prelude: ‘Fostered alike by beauty and by fear.’13

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The poem is thus thickly embedded in its ‘monumental’ intertext. More obscurely, Allison informs us that the source of the line I will tell
 How the laundry basket squeaked is an entry from Katherine Mansfield’s journal from 22 January 1916. Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murray were in the South of France at the time; Mansfield is perhaps still mourning the death of her brother, Leslie Heron Beauchamp, who had been killed in action: ‘You, my little sun of it, are set’: Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World. It must be mysterious, as though floating. It must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands . . .’ [sic] I shall tell everything, even of how the laundry-basket squeaked at 75. But all must be told with a sense of mystery, a radiance, an afterglow, because you, my little sun of it, are set. You have dropped over the dazzling brim of the world. Now I must play my part.14

And ‘note of exile’ refers to Chekov, as discussed between Heaney and McLaverty, and these examples do not exhaust all the intertextual references in the poem. The intertext is a historical–compositional reality, a weaving together of lines and words remembered or noted by the poet. He later wrote, Allison tells us, in his introduction to a book of McLaverty’s short stories, ‘“Look for the intimate thing,” he would say, and go on to praise the “note of exile” in Chekhov.’15 The intertext is thus perfectly real, but in a different sense from the referential real. The (inter)textual real depends on repetition and recomposition: that Chekov once wrote an essay called ‘In Exile’ in 1892, that McLaverty repeated this to Heaney and that this phrase exists as a part of Western literature’s cultural capital. Another register of the real with which the poem is networked is the referential real, to which I have referred to a number of times. This does not depend on repetition and recomposition, but on the existence of singular historical events. Michael Parker has confirmed that the central encounter in ‘Fosterage’ takes place in Belfast in 1962, when Heaney was starting to be productive. McLaverty was influencing and ‘fostering’ the poet at this stage, recommending readings, including Katherine Mansfield, Hopkins and Kavanagh.16 And if Heaney had not encountered McLaverty on Royal Avenue, Belfast, in 1962, would this matter? Not really, but it would matter to the poem’s relations to the referential real if McLaverty (the dedicatee) and Royal Avenue did not exist in 1962. Those relations give the poem the power of the ‘reality effect’,17 as Barthes called it, an effect in that the words ‘Royal Avenue’ refer precisely to an avenue in Belfast in exactly the same way that



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they operate as they appear in Belfast city maps. But there is more to be said about this kind of reality effect, and that is the ‘intimate thing’ conjured by the quotation from Katherine Mansfield about the laundry basket squeaking at 75, a house, most probably, from her New Zealand youth. We all know how a laundry basket squeaks when hefted with damp washing, don’t we? It has to be a cane one, not plastic. This is the realist detail that surprises with its observational acuity, an acuity that, in this case, adds a sonorous dimension. It is the ‘intimate thing’ that causes Heaney to exclaim, ‘Description is revelation!’, advice coming from McLaverty, a writer of realist fiction. So, there are two levels so far in this multirealist (aesthetic) description, which I would claim are essential to the poem’s power to reproduce: the historically real and the intertextual–compositional remix. I will go on to add the intersubjective, which I call ‘partnership’, but first I will add a final register of the real, the spiritual. This leaps out in the final word obols, a suitably archaic Greek term for the kind of silver coin that would be placed on the tongue to secure one’s passage across the Acheron. With this word the ghosts of the classical ancestors are called upon, as if the poet descended from the Greeks in a European tradition, which in a sense he does. The ancestors’ ‘life’ is immortal, to the extent that the echoes of their voices are not forgotten, and with the silver words given him, this poet too, it is implied, will pass over into their immortal number. This transcendentalism, this translation from the material to the spiritual, is also a necessary and real part of the (multirealist, Western) aesthetic I am attempting to describe; there would be few poems that did not attempt to borrow a bit of this transcendent soul stuff. The poem, then, is composed of these three different registers of the real, and there may be more in other poems. They are mutually supportive, just as the intersubjective partner relations are essential to a poem’s capacity to be produced and reproduced. In ‘Fosterage’, the young poet ‘newly cubbed in language’ receives all sorts of advice: ‘Go your own way’; ‘Do your own work’; ‘Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.’ At each reading, the McLaverty–Heaney dyad has added to it the writer–reader one; both are relations of fosterage and influence. Life and the life-career of poems as they move through the world cannot be reproduced without partners. These may be human beings, metaphors (‘cubbed’, above, links to nature, the earthy genealogical opposite to the concluding transcendence), nurturing cultures, concepts and material things like spades. Because of reproduction, the category of ‘life’ is also central to my scheme. One must be wary of that old Leavisite category that tends to reference an uncritical liberal-humanism,18 but one can nonetheless conceive of the literary text as existing in an ecology that seeks to sustain itself in a particular place. Under what conditions, one may ask, and with what partners, is the literary text being fostered? We shall have to describe all the things making

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up this ecology, some of them human, some non-human, forming hybrid assemblages that work together in relations of immanence. Reproducibility is about those necessary partnerships that make life (the life of the text, also) flourish: educational institutions and associated bureaucracies, class distinctions, reading groups, literary festivals, publishing houses and so on. Unlike biological reproduction, which can’t defer the death of individuals, cultural reproduction seems to have the magical power of sustaining the life of a work for long periods of time if the right cultural mix is maintained. Bruno Latour’s recent work helps us see that this literary life is of a different ontological order to human, animal or plant life – the beings who inhabit the (biological) reproductive order. The life of fictional beings is a separate mode of existence. In his discussion of the remarkable work of Etienne Souriau in the 1930s, Latour sets up five modes: phenomena, things, souls, fictional beings and the language of religion. All these modes of existence are not reducible to each other. Irreducibility is a principle for this multirealist perception he is describing. He uses quotations from 
Souriau to support, almost in passing, a kind of theory of literature as cultivation. The existence of the work of art depends on it being fostered: It is not a matter of following the ontic beyond its attachments to phenomena and to experience, right through to the void; this is the error of so many metaphysicians (and no doubt phenomenology too). It is a matter of inventing or discovering (as in discovering a treasure) positive modes of existence, coming to meet us with their palm fronds, to greet our hopes and aspirations, or our problematic speculations, in order to gather them in and comfort them. All other research is a metaphysical famine.19

There is rich material to be mined here for a radically empirical theory of literary reading that asserts relations as real, while denying the metaphysical ‘void’ he refers to. So, the premise is that communicative events (like the reading of a poem) do not bridge gaps, but are things that exist to be greeted. Many literary theorists are happy to acknowledge that the text and the process of literary production are dense sets of relations. But they are rarely radical enough, or empirical enough, to follow through the relations, the chains of associations, because most are locked into a representational philosophy that needs gaps. At a crucial point they like to leap in to the void: they call it ‘the space between’; they evoke forms of transcendence – they call it indeterminacy or ambiguity; they revel in the rich elaboration of potential or possibility and will defend to the end the idea that a text’s ultimate unknowability is the justification and the reward of sustained readerly attention. This negative void is there only because of the SUBJECT – TEXT – OBJECT communicative scenario, with the poverty of its three points and two gaps, giving rise to all



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that agonising over representation; how adequately the text represents the world to consciousness, as if there were only two or three different kinds of things that exist: ineffable human subjectivity, dubious objective exteriority and endless attempts at representation in between. If by ‘epistemology’ we name the discipline that tries to understand how we manage to bridge the gap between representations and reality, the only conclusion to be drawn about it is that this discipline has no subject matter whatsoever, because we never bridge such a gap – not, mind you, because we don’t know anything objectively, but because there is never such a gap. The gap is an artefact due to the wrong positioning of the knowledge acquisition pathway. We imagine a bridge over an abyss, when the whole activity consists of a drift through a chain of experience where there are many successive event-like termini and many substitutions of heterogeneous media.20

So, this is why I want to argue that the literary work of art is not a kind of language bridge between subject and object. Rather, its tentacles extend in all sorts of directions where the text’s relations expand into an empirical multirealist world. Here the text is sustained in a kind of existence, but what kind of existence is this? While a literary text, as an object, is not alive, its existence is defined through its active relations with other things, human and non-human, in a complex ecology. This is a space of negotiation and transformation that does not privilege either subject or object. The story or poem does not exist primarily in relation to human subjectivities (phenomenology), nor primarily in relation to objects (materialism). It has its own existence not reducible to either of those privileged poles in the modernist conceptual architecture. It is not the secondary effect of any primary realities and cannot be reduced to them in the manner that a sociology can reduce a religious experience to a set of structures and functions or a religion can assert that evolutionary theory is wrong and the world was created in six days. The literary field is replete with such reductions, which we call available readings, and they are equally unsatisfactory (a ‘Marxist reading’, or ‘reading with Butler’, for example). These risk crossing the inevitable communicative bridge before they come to it, and they risk taking away the text’s own voice. Its ‘own voice’ is what makes it reproducible on its terms, as opposed to a reproduction of a kind of reading. A reading, like a Marxist reading, is sustained through a chain of reference, whereas a literary work is sustained by reproducing itself. Reference is the domain of knowledge, a separate mode of existence from reproduction. But what has a poem got that a Frederic Jameson critical text lacks? It has a reproducible generic form, and it conjoins language to being to create an event (whereas with literary critical writing, language just refers, and disappears as

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it goes along). Obviously, the literary work of art never emerges ex nihilo: the elements come together, composed through labour, constructed from an intertextual heritage, but not fabricated out of or in relation to the void. Souriau used the word ‘instauration’ to grasp a process of devotional creation that might be experienced by both writer and reader. To say, for example, that a fact is ‘constructed’ is inevitably (and they paid me good money to know this) to designate the knowing subject as the origin of the vector, as in the example of God the potter. But the opposite, to say of a work of art that it results from an instauration, is to get oneself ready to see the potter as the one who welcomes, gathers, prepares, explores and invents the form of a work, just as one discovers or invents a treasure.21 But this growing existence is made, we can see, out of a double modality that finally comes together, in the unity of a soul being progressively invented in the labouring process. Often there is no warning: the finished work is always up to a certain point a novelty, discovery or surprise. So, that’s what I was looking for, that’s what I was meant to make!22

Now, in order to “instaure” a text in its own truth (“it is manifested in its entire accomplishment, in its own truth.”23), my method continues to ask the two questions of the previous chapter: how is it keeping itself alive in its place? Place-based analysis is an explicit critique of European modernist universals, and proliferates in postcolonial criticism and in eco-criticism, as in the work of Edward Casey, Lucy Lippard and myself.24 And the second question I ask is: what are its partners for reproductive purposes? as we look to the networks of devotion that keep the text alive. * * * But as this chapter draws to a close, I feel I have not yet gotten close enough to ‘Fosterage’ to really foster its poetic mode of existence, one that it shares with other lyric poems, and could possibly share with a prose on the way to becoming poetry. A critical prose that breaks, with some alarm, from that distant judgemental perspective that would maintain a pious evenness in the face of creative work,25 and instead seek out a partnership with that capacity art has to break forth into its own existential style in the face of a Benjaminian historical ‘emergency’.26 Not determined by context, not reducible to any one or two of its multiply real registers, but coterminous with them, reproducing their forms in transformative imitation, wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Heaney, channelling Mr. McLaverty, remembering Mansfield and Hopkins, inventing Chekov and finding revelation with the Ancients? This is what Taussig calls ‘the mimetic faculty, the nature that uses culture to create second nature, the faculty to copy, imitate, make models, explore difference, yield into and become Other’.27



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Listen, let me grip your elbow; forget judgement and distance. If you want fosterage, there is never such a gap. Let’s investigate critical proximity, do the analysis of ‘Fosterage’ without mysterious voids and trace precise relations between real things. The poem is not constructed as a series of benign linguistic equivalences and figures, but as a series of transformative differences that probe always towards alterities. In order for transformations to take place as little events (within the text and in its iterations through various worlds), the text must tempt or try out the Other, to see if it will yield to the point of reproductive partnership. Now, strangely, it is only on this multirealist platform that the poem can speak with its true voice, as its own thing, not reduced to some reading or another, by virtue of the work it has to do trying out its various Others. You will foster ‘Fosterage’ by sending it out, to your Royal Avenue of the imagination. As soon as you can place it elsewhere, for example, in King Street near my place in Sydney, you have partnered it in that new way and found fertile associations for it in its new location, which are necessary to its continued reproduction. Its lyric existence has the property of proximate linkage, of partnership: neither the historical/referential reduction – ‘No, no, not King St in 2016! It has to be about Royal Avenue, Belfast, in 1962!’ – nor the humanist universalism (‘Timeless, it speaks to us all’). A reproductive mode of existence necessitates specific, working and perhaps unexpected partnerships (which have nothing to do with representations which imply a gap, between referent and sign, for example). A poem is now read (or listened to) as traces of life engendered by partners. These are constituted as chains of intimately connected transformations which, working with alterities, generate vitality. There are no metaphors of depth or transcendence, just a ceaseless trying of things out with others. To say that a poem lives in a place and can go on to live in new places is to refuse modernist universalisms and to engage the facts and values of its particular existence as a local voyager.

Notes 1. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 190. 2. ‘Oscar Voters Overwhelmingly White, Male’, Los Angeles Times, 19 February 2012. 3. Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979), 136. 4. Bruno Latour, Enquête sur les modes d’existence. 5. On correlationism, see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (New York: Continuum, 2009). 6. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2007). Graham Harman, ‘The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer:

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Object-Oriented Literary Criticism’, New Literary History 43 (2012): 183–203, hereafter cited in text; Timothy Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry’, New Literary History 43 (2012): 205–24. 7. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1978); Morton, ‘An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry’. 8. Harman, ‘Well-Wrought Broken Hammer’. 9. Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging’, in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 8–9. 10. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, 7 vols. (Paris: La Découverte; Les Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 1996–1997). 11. Seamus Heaney, ‘“Fosterage” from “Singing School,”’ in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996, ed. Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). ed. Seamus Heaney (New York: Farr Reprinted by permission of the publisher). 12. Jonathan Allison, ‘“Friendship’s Garland” and the Manuscripts of Seamus Heaney’s “Fosterage”’, The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005): 58–71. 13. Allison, ‘Friendship’s Garland’, 61. 14. Cited in Allison, ‘Friendship’s Garland’, 63. 15. Allison, ‘Friendship’s Garland’, 63n. 16. Michael Parker, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (London: Macmillan, 1993), 29, 149. 17. Roland Barthes, ‘The Reality Effect’, in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 141–48. 18. Terry Eagleton has narrated the Leavis’ use of the concept of ‘life’: ‘Scrutiny . . . represented nothing less than the last-ditch stand of liberal humanism, concerned . . . with the unique value of the individual and the creative realm of the interpersonal. These values could be summarised as ‘Life’, a word which Scrutiny made a virtue of not being able to define. If you asked for some reasoned theoretical statement of their case, you had thereby demonstrated that you were in the outer darkness: either you felt Life or you did not. Great literature was a literature reverently open to Life, and what Life was could be demonstrated by great literature. The case was circular, intuitive and proof against all argument, reflecting the enclosed coterie of the Leavisites themselves.’ Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 36. 19. Etienne Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1943), 92. 20. Bruno Latour, ‘A Textbook Case Revisited: Knowledge as a Mode of Existence’, in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. E. Hackett, O. Amsterdamska, M. Lynch and J. Wacjman, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 83. 21. Bruno Latour, ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, trans. Stephen Muecke (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 331. 22. Souriau, cited in Latour, ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’, 310.



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23. Etienne Souriau, Avoir une âme (Lyon: Annales de l’Université de Lyon, 1939). 24. Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: New Press, 1997); Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Kensington: University of NSW Press, 2004). 25. Stephen Muecke, ‘Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgement’, Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40–58. 26. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Harcourt, Brace: 1968), 245–55. 27. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii.

Chapter 7

An Experiment with Truth and Beauty in Cultural Studies

In early December 2012, I’d just returned from Sciences Po in Paris, where I had the chance to work with Bruno Latour and witness the launching of his new book, Enquête sur les modes d’existence: une anthropologie des modernes.1 I reported back to the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference that year where ‘things’ took a decidedly ‘material turn’, having been arrested by the curious oxymoron in Latour’s book, ‘the idealism of . . . materialism’: ‘out-dated terms’, says Latour, that are ‘the main feature of the anthropology [of the Moderns]’ and ‘the first result of this inquiry, the one that governs all the others’.2 What does he mean by this idealism of materialism? Those familiar with Latour’s earlier work3 might guess that this is a critique of a singular materialism or material world, akin to the singularity of ‘nature’ set off against the plurality of cultures. For the cultural studies tradition, multiculturalism or cultural pluralism has been the happy hunting ground where we have celebrated relativism, marginality and diversity. But now we are paying the price for failing to ecologise, for leaving Nature intact. We failed to realise that there is no such thing, and that to take seriously the deconstruction of the nature–culture opposition is to see diversity not just ‘in’ the domain of cultures, but also across ‘naturecultures’ where non-human beings and things also play a part. So, of course, materialism is a culturally specific concept. It only exists in those countries that use words such as matérialisme, materialismo or Materialismus. And this is despite the seemingly universal understanding of what ‘matter’ is in the hard sciences (everything is made of atoms, sure, but in what domains does this really ‘matter’?) or what Madonna meant when she sang about the material world. There are worlds in which ‘matter’, as defined by physics, is not institutionalised, and where Madonna songs are not on the 77

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market. So, if the West has invented materialism as part of its Modern culture, we should understand it in its specificity, not in its potential universalism. It is this invention of materialism that Latour calls an idealism of materialism. We have idealised the material world with formulations such as ‘the world around us’, again in parallel with the way Nature is singularised, reified and separated from our cultures in which we see ourselves as subjectively residing. This was a pretty neat way to go for eighteenth-century Europe: it provided an exploitable domain called Nature from which humans could now alienate themselves conceptually; it centralised the human mind and it confined god to the heavens. The spiritual also defined the material by opposition, for divinity was conceived as a pure ideal, and it had nothing to do with the ‘mere’ materiality of church buildings or religious practices. But it is a dangerous idealism for today’s world where we now want to specify the vital, even sacred, links between beings and things. Moderns have been tolerant of traditional societies’ appeals to sacred relations crisscrossing humans, animals and things. But they don’t really believe in totems and other such mumbo jumbo, because they have their own beliefs, their own reductions to the two major materialist bottom lines: atoms and dollars. But if we accept that planetary crises are forcing us to re-ecologise, and thus to demodernise, ‘we’ can no longer continue to export European formulations to other worlds as if they were universal and benign. We sense a way out of being overwhelmed by inert matter in the physical sense or by capitalist materialism in Madonna’s sense, and that means specifying materialism and then reinventing it. Modes of Existence: The Ontological Turn So, Latour’s new book enters the fray with the project of making ‘room to accommodate other modes of existence rather than simply multiple representations of a single world’.4 There are fifteen such modes of existence that relate to Western institutions because that is the culture he is anthropologising. They include the Law, Politics, Religion, Fiction, Metamorphosis, Morality, Reproduction, Habit, and so on. The human is not a special mode of existence. We ‘reproduce’ like everything else. There you go, human exceptionalism deleted with a stroke of the pen from this ontological pantheon! The reproductive mode of existence is the way in which things persist or are maintained in their specific existence; mountains as much as chickens. These pullulating reproductive beings repeat and multiply along lines of force, surviving from one moment to the next and taking the risk of leaping across hiatuses, because they cannot go backwards as they evolve into the future. Materialism emerges with a special way



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that reproduction (Latour uses the shorthand [REP] to designate this mode) crosses with another mode of existence he calls reference [REF]. There are whole chapters on these in the book, but in brief, you can think about the way in which that strange tribe of European Moderns has a mode of being where it constantly refers and has institutions based on this activity, such as reference libraries, or archaeological museums that entertain the capacity to make knowledge maintain its reach across time and space. So, the materialism we are familiar with is the one that crosses over between things being busy reproducing themselves and things that can be known at a distance. As Latour explains: For a clear understanding of what follows, the reader must be prepared to stop considering this ‘matter’ as a province of reality, but rather as an extremely bizarre institution, one that has had the rather unfortunate consequence, moreover, of creating, by contrast, a ‘knowing subject’ and even a ‘mind’ [esprit] capable of extracting itself from ‘matter’ by projecting an ‘external world’ ‘outside’ itself, a world whose existence has become uncertain, furthermore. It is this strange series of inventions that has made the Moderns opaque to themselves, and, what is more serious, it has left them unable to grasp the ‘other cultures’, which had been getting along perfectly well without either the ‘material world’ or ‘subjects’.5

For those of us brought up in this Modern culture, it takes a bit of an effort not only to reconsider bowing down before atoms and dollars, but also to rethink the spatial metaphor that has matter surrounding us. Latour goes on: Let us note first of all that with the notion and even the connotations of the word ‘network’ we have gained room and space where we can collect values without merely mouthing the words. If we get into the habit of speaking of trajectories and passes that are limited and specific to each occasion for the paths of persistence [REP], chains of reference [REF], law [LAW], or political autonomy [POL], the landscape spread out before the observer is already entirely different from the one that obliged him to believe himself surrounded on all sides by an ‘external material world’ that would have invaded the entire space and that would have forced all the other values to retreat little by little. But to go where? Into the mind? Into the brain? Into language? Into symbolics? No one knew. It was a black hole. Stifling. Suffocating.6

It is precisely this crowding out of all other values by ‘materialistic’ ones that, for example, makes the aesthetic the realm of representations, fictions, symbols and ideals; in other words, unreal. But I am perfectly prepared to treat dear Emma Bovary as real, just like my old friend Daffy Duck. That kind of real can flourish if materialism withdraws to make space for such

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fictional beings [FIC] that exist on their own terms, not as representations or pale reflections of the really real. In a recent interview, Latour is scathing: ‘I’m a bit sick of hearing it said that fictional beings are all about the suspension of disbelief [English in original]. That’s a really dumb way of showing them respect.’7 One of the features of fictional beings that we reproductive beings don’t have is immortality; and as long as such beautiful beings hold us in their thrall, our devotion to them will keep them alive.8 So up until now, says Latour, the Moderns thought they had to refer to ‘fictional beings’, ‘gods’, ‘idols’, ‘passions’, ‘imaginings’, as real things only out of charity – critical rather than Christian charity. It was understood that with such things it was only a matter of ‘representations’ ‘taken for beings’ by people whose ‘convictions’ had to be respected, to be sure, but whose ‘phantasms’ had to be ‘feared’ at the same time, and one had to protect oneself above all against ‘an always possible return of the irrational and of archaism’.9

It is this version of the idealism of materialism that sustains the realism of disciplines such as the social sciences and ‘economics’ with its cold hard gaze on the true material value of things, precisely calculated on the balance sheet, leaving cultural studies constantly scoffed at as the domain of the soft, the ineffable and the immaterial. But economies and Economics, as we know even more post-GFC, are replete with mythologies. Things are bought and sold with more hope for a better life than any religion can provide, traders are totally wired on Red Bull, crank or weird financial fictions; they run on all kinds of hunches and passions. Yet we allow the pretence that they are the cold, hard calculators while we in the humanities lie down and accept that we deal with ‘mere’ fictions.

Truth and beauty in an experimental register We have to counter-argue that the myths, the poetry, the art are equally powerful and existing in real worlds. That we are not in the business of humanising an otherwise inhuman ‘material’ world, nor providing moral judgement on facts that are already ‘out there’ (as they say). No, what the hell, let me say that our core values in cultural studies should concern the pursuit of truth and beauty, a continuity, in effect with the older humanities, as explained by Meaghan Morris.10 Imagine being able to say, ‘This culture or this ecosystem is too beautiful to destroy’ without resorting to the help of the (a) ‘purely materialist’ arguments of the social scientist or the biologist or (b) a peroration into scholarly aesthetic history. Other people do use the



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beauty defence, but cultural studies folk think them naïve or conservative. They will knock in vain at our door looking for help, for they will only find versions of The Beauty Myth. But to me you might astutely object, ‘Hey, you are bringing back major ideals here’ with these two old-fashioned and ‘apolitical’ concepts. Yes, I have tried to explain the idealism of materialism in order to contain it, to provincialise it. To make sure that when we talk of materialities we know that they come from a culture where beings persist in a mode of reproduction, crossed with a mode of reference. And not other kinds of beings that persist in different ways. So, having confined materialism, the field is opened up for aesthetics to operate in a fully robust manner, not as an imitation or distortion that will be forever inadequate in its representation of some more real world. ‘Having elevated art’, says Michael Taussig, ‘as both commodity and metaphysical substance, having imprisoned art in museums, galleries and boardrooms, having thus separated art from the artisan, having opposed “art” to the “useful,” have we not become blind to the force of the aesthetic, of beauty, if you will, coursing through everyday life? Surely beauty is as much an infrastructure as are highways and bridges, storytelling and the Internet, rainfall and global warming?’11 The distinction and denigration of the force of the aesthetic persists in the language of constructivism, where a bridge, as a construction, is never addressed as a ‘mere construction’ but a van Gogh representation of a bridge is. Restoring force to the aesthetic repoliticises it, at the same time as it is dematerialises it, for politics is never without aesthetics. Politics also depends on the forces of attraction, gathering allies to one’s cause and repulsion from others’. Truth is neither singular nor absolute, obviously, but operates with different criteria in each of Latour’s ontological plural set of worlds. In the referential domain, for example, facts have to be well and truly constructed with the right procedures and materials; they don’t exist ‘out there’ prior to their discovery. And once brought into being, they need an institution to maintain them in good health. For cultural studies, I’m interested in how our scholars might pursue and build up certain truths in specific ways. Why is it that anthropologists are constantly called for expert testimony in court cases pursuing a specific legal [LAW] set of truths about cultures, but cultural studies scholars are typically not? Why did psychology rapidly become the discipline, in the same contexts, with the truth about human subjectivity? Clearly, it is cultural studies’ ability only to deconstruct, rather than to craft, beauty and truth that leaves us out of the picture. We are the kind of expert witness that would be challenged and rejected. Does our capacity for elaborate intellectual critique circulate in its own domain, the humanities seminar, without this ability to cross over into less familiar territory?

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Let’s take this expertise to be exemplary, rather than literal. For it is not the aim to produce humanities or cultural studies folk fully armed and puffed up with expertise. It is rather the aim to test their propositions or techniques via a detour, an excursion into a public sphere. Truth (also according to Latour) would thus necessarily be produced and made visible in such detours, never through direct application (as in the Internet ‘double click’ version of accessing the easy answers). And let’s not forget that your ‘day in court’ makes you a changed person through the experience, while the cultural studies you return to will henceforth not be quite the same domain anymore because, through your mediation, it has been touched by its public exposure. The test was a reality endured and paid for in expended effort to translate one set of concerns into another. It is thus a political act and allies have been gained or lost, depending on the outcome of the experience/experiment. It is easy to see, then, that this Latourian idea of necessary detours and transformations pertains to the basic elaboration of chains of knowledge acquisition in cultural studies. You don’t have to wait to be called an expert witness, although that trial would help focus your effort. I might go so far as to say that if cultural studies is not experimenting, trying things out against alterity, it is at rest. I would modestly advocate that we build up and follow some practical procedures used to strive towards truth as a well-wrought construction, rather than the more depressing deconstructive lesson of learning to live with the disappointment of knowing that no one ever gets there. Beauty and truth are part of the infrastructure, as Michael Taussig says, materially real, but not dominated by materialism, which remains, as Latour says, ‘a thought for the future’: To become materialists for real, we are going to have to instill in materialism a bit of ontological realism, counting on many beings, well-nourished, fattened up, plump-cheeked. To push this inquiry forward, we are going to have to go through ontological fattening therapies. Our anthropologist doesn’t want to have anything more to do with ‘representations’, those succubi engorged with wind that disappear like Dracula at the break of day, leaving you bloodless. Materialism is still a thought of the future.12

Notes 1. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 2. Ibid., 98. 3. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).



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4. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 106. 5. Ibid., 98. 6. Ibid., 141. 7. Bruno Latour, ‘Interview: The Universal Has to Be Made’ [‘Entretien: L’universel, il faut le faire,’] Critique special issue on ‘Bruno Latour or the Plurality of Worlds’ [‘Bruno Latour ou la pluralité des mondes.’], 786 (November 2012): 962. 8. Stephen Muecke, ‘“I Am What I Am Attached To”: On Bruno Latour’s “Inquiry into the Modes of Existence”,’ Los Angeles Review of Books (28 December 2012), http://lareviewofbooks.org/ article.php?id=1279&fulltext=1. 9. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 176. 10. Meaghan Morris, ‘Truth and Beauty in Our Times’, in Our Cultural Heritage, ed. John Bigelow (Canberra: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1998). 11. Michael Taussig, Beauty and the Beast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5. 12. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 177.

Part III

Speculative Histories

Earlier, with ‘Don McLeod’s Law’ I was trying to craft a style that was ‘a bit of a yarn’, as if the voice of old bushmen like McLeod had infused my text with its accent and rhythm. I go even further with ‘A Diplomat for the History Wars’, adapting the style of Aboriginal narrator Paddy Roe, with whom I have done a couple of books transcribing his speech in this verbatim fashion. I hope that this is not seen as purely imitative, but rather as an homage to a vernacular style that is very Australian, belonging to no-one in particular, and yet also with methodological roots in Albert Lord and Dennis Tedlock1 as well as Jerome Rothenberg’s ethno-poetics, cited earlier. Conceptually, these pieces embrace the interest in object-oriented ontologies that was emerging from about 2000, as well as the ‘speculative realism’ that was promoted by Graham Harman and others in conversation with Bruno Latour. Speculative realism, although based, like Derrida, in Heidegger, leaves behind his obsession with the text, to make some calculated guesses about what things in the world are getting up to, when they don’t talk our languages and they are not seen as being there just to signify to us. Captain Cook, in this vein, is not just a central figure with a story, but is made up of a massive distribution of weird ‘stuff’ that anchors the popular aspects of his culture. All three chapters contribute to the field of experimental history with three strategies that are all minor-becomings: treating the oral as prior; deflating the life of the Cook of official history by testing his existence in popular culture; and using a story diplomatically to bring out an intercolonial link between India and Australia.

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Note 1 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).

Chapter 8

A Diplomat for the History Wars

Sydney, Tuesday, 15 October 2013: A right-wing government has just been elected in Canberra, and the new Education Minister, Christopher Pyne, has already made statements reported as having the potential to reignite the ‘history wars’ of the Howard era.1 Concerned about this tendency in the government and the media to want to go straight to war without even thinking of having a reasoned debate or taking steps to reconcile opposing views, the writer, Stephen Muecke, has sought the wisdom of a friend of the family, a former diplomat, in Afternoon Light, an old folks’ home in the northern suburb of Pymble in Sydney. The old man is the veteran of some very real ‘theatres of war’ – he was at the fall of Singapore – but has also thought about the events of the past in terms of the need for ‘cultural diplomacy’. I arrive with my voice recorder, and I am mildly surprised to find a few of the old man’s friends sitting around in the garden with him. They are there to enjoy the exchange, which is transcribed here verbatim: I’ve got a few of the other ‘inmates’ here with me [laughs] – Is that OK? – You want a cuppa, young fella? SM: No, that’s fine, and yes, yes please – [recorder starts again] Well – I can tell you this story – if you like? – Oh, not a long story, only a short one – it’s about that fight over history – 87

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in the late nineties – about the time of the Howard government – well during the time of the Howard government anyway – Everybody knows this story – And everybody knows about history or at least they think they do – history comes in books – that much is pretty clear – writing is what organizes history – But if you tell stories – Well, that’s just talk, idle chatter – but we know all about what they call oral history too – when the spoken word can count as true – in some ways – But anyway, that’s just the frame for my story – but I’ll come back to it – now I want to paint the picture – So, there was this guy – living in Sydney Windschuttle I think they called him [listener: Keith Windschuttle] – That’s right, thanks, his name was Keith Windschuttle – so he wrote this book that made a really big stink and everyone was talking about it – all over the newspapers – The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – [listener: he’s got four volumes] what’s that? [listener again: four books, four volumes] Really? Four volumes, now – must be a lot of work, eh? [laughter] [second listener: only two so far, volumes one and three] Out of sequence, eh? – oh well, no matter – he must have a good reason for that –



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Anyway, it struck me that with that title The Fabrication of Aboriginal History – he was meaning to say that those he was arguing against – they got called the ‘black armband’ version of the historical events of colonization – then, right after, he and his mates got dubbed the ‘white blindfold’ mob! [laughs] – That the idea of fabrication was that the black armbanders were making things up – creating politically-correct propaganda – by carefully selecting the facts to suit the case – Well – I’ve seen this before – when you mediate – diplomatically – you know, both sides are inevitably ‘making it up’, they must have – they have arrived at that position through a process – through hard work – and you don’t mediate by saying that somewhere there is a direct path to the truth of the whole matter and try to put them both on the one true path – as if there is a single truth would resolve the issues – no – you try to understand and respect both positions – understand what each party really holds dear, and why they do – Then you try to get them to trade: well, if you can agree with this aspect, then perhaps we can eliminate that difference – and so on – chipping away at their differences – it’s a long slow process – The diplomat is the mediator – The cool head between two, or more, passionately held positions – It’s a dangerous situation – They are itching for a fight these fellas – Oh I’ve seen it too – Those politicians like Howard – I can say anything now, no-one cares what I think – Yeah, you can publish anything, young fella, I don’t care –

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What was I . . .? oh, yes, Howard – Well he was brought up on Churchill – And Bean and other war histories – So when he got to be PM, he thought that’s what you’ve got to do! – To go down in history – Never underestimate these guys’ egos – War is history – Or rather history is made by wars – True – To some extent – But you could also ask, what is it you want to stress in history? What’s your perspective? My wife was always banging on about the eight-hour day and the suffragettes – That was history for her – And didn’t take any notice of ANZAC day or anything – Me neither for that matter; I didn’t go on the marches – Oh, I did once, after we were demobbed – I could tell you what war’s really like one day – That’s another story – Another story altogether – But you were wanting to know about diplomacy, eh? Oh, and Howard – What I wanted to say about him – He was brought up adulating Churchill and everything – So first chance he gets he takes the country into the Iraq war – Because of a bloody bunch of lies, ‘scuse my French – [Listener: Yes, but that Saddam was a dangerous terrorist, that’s what it was about . . . ] [Another listener: and oil!] [everyone starts talking. Recorder stops. . . . .) recorder starts again] Anyway, despite the differences of opinion about the Iraq war! [laughter] – War or diplomacy, that’s my point – Politicians, some of them, want to go to war – Play the hero – Rather than call in the diplomats –



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And newspapers like a good war story – You remember that famous flick, Citizen Kane? ‘You provide the prose poems’, says Kane – reminds me of Murdoch! – and ‘I’ll provide the war’ – But not much news, not much drama, to be had in a slow diplomatic process – So that’s why we’ve seen a decline in the number of diplomats in the foreign service – Missions reduced through budget cuts – As I was saying, the diplomat mediates – No representation without mediation, as they say2 – They go backwards and forwards and each time the brief is revised. They are in a middle ground3 – ‘diplomatic immunity’, waving white flags – but when they talk – when they negotiate – the tone has to be absolutely right – (a lot of them had literature degrees and no wonder!) – you can’t say the wrong thing – but the tone has to be right too – talking to the others as if you understood their position deeply and empathized with it – talking to the others respectfully in their own language – sometimes literally in their own language, traditionally diplomats were multilingual – Now, where has that kind of mutual respect gone? – in the so-called history wars? – Did Windschuttle ever talk to an Aboriginal person while he was doing his research? I don’t think so – Certainly doesn’t look like it – No need to talk, he would say – It’s not about memory or oral history – it’s all about documents – So if there’s no need for diplomacy in history, you can go straight to war – And diplomacy in actual history gets forgotten too – Frontier diplomacy – All those negotiations that took place between whites and blacks – From Philip onwards – And especially out in the bush, out in that middle ground –

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Where people had to negotiate to survive – There’s a history of diplomacy yet to be written there too – In this county – But in the history wars ‘the facts’ get used as a weapon – There it is, written in a document – Must be true – ‘The facts can speak for themselves’ – and you hit your opponent over the head with it! [laughter] And you thought facts were used for enlightenment [shakes his head slowly] – [end of recording] Notes 1. Mark Kenny and Josephine Tovey, ‘Libs Reignite Culture Wars Over Anzac Day Teaching’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 April 2013, http://www.smh.com.au/ federal-politics/political-news/libs-reignite-culture-wars-over-anzac-day-teaching20130422-2iaro.html. 2. ‘Truth [can] be obtained not by decreasing the number of intermediary steps, but by increasing the number of mediations.’ Bruno Latour, ‘Coming Out as a Philosopher’, Social Studies of Science 40.4 (2010): 601. 3. See Richard White’s wonderful book: The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Chapter 9

A Touching and Contagious Captain Cook Thinking History through Things

The French philosopher Albert Camus was born in 1913, Jonathan Rée tells us, . . . to an illiterate, fatherless family on a working-class estate in eastern Algeria. ‘I was poised mid-way between poverty and sunshine,’ [Camus] wrote, and it wasn’t until he went to Paris and saw what it was like to live in a cold climate that he understood social injustice. Poverty was proof that history is unfair: the sun was a reminder that ‘history’ is not everything.1

History produces perceptions of unfairness, it also produces its own unfairnesses. Here, under this antipodean sun, ancient philosophy reminds us that history is not everything, and also that history was only a recent blow-in and sometimes a crude technology for triumphantly putting dates on things, like monuments and inventions, and allowing this world to be infected with the virus of modernity to ensure that the so-called ancients, the Indigenous peoples, remain ontologically prior. In Australian history, Captain Cook has become a pivot for these false perceptions of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. This is perhaps why, as a sense of historical injustice drove people in the 1960s to do the work of assembling Aboriginal histories, that the revisionist backlash that followed it in the 1990s centred on Cook as a necessary and heroic redeemer of white centrality, if not superiority. So, in order to experiment with history and to gain a metahistorical foothold, I want to look at history and the figure of Cook from the vantage point of culture. In his work on social memory, Chris Healy set out the parameters for the kind of experimental study my colleague Katrina Schlunke and I have

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undertaken, not ‘. . . Captain Cook, a name which refers us not to an actual historical figure’, but Cook as ‘an enduring icon, a huge network of narratives, images and ceremonies’,2 as he goes on usefully to contrast the building up of the whitefella nationalist mythology (Cook as origin, as hero of science and exploration, and even as a lower-class battler) with the recent disruption by Aboriginal stories of Cook as thief and violator. History, like many other things, is ‘constructed’. It is the product of all the hard work of observers, opinion makers, teachers, writers, artists of various sorts, archivists and the builders of monuments, museums, texts, databases and commemorative events. These various activities are simultaneous and interlinked, spreading out over the country, opening the archive onto past materials and ideas, as well as projecting some of those, as political hopes, into the future. This ‘assemblage’ of history is a construction of a different nature to the notion of construction of history as a set of representations, which tends to derive from a linear model of subject – text – object, a ‘correlationist’ model according to which the world appears to consciousness via the filters of culturally specific restrictions of language. This post-Kantian model holds that neither can we conceive of humans without an exterior world nor can we conceive of a world without humans, but must base all philosophy in a correlation between the two.3 Correlationism is orthodox among those continental philosophers for whom the critique of the subject–object dualism and of representation is now a conditioned reflex. So, their philosophical limit is that the world has to be represented to humankind, the final arbiter of their own earthly destiny: what matters to ‘man’ is ‘himself’. Having abandoned the knowability of the world to the sole medium of language, with all its slipperiness, these narcissistic humanists are left ‘to celebrate the irreducible wonder of human subjectivity’.4 And indeed, the subject of history is a certain type of person: morally righteous (often), omniscient (usually), dislocated from the places where things are happening and wearing tweed, if we think, perhaps, of the English invention of the ‘History Men’. Taking language out of the equation and decentring the human subject does not join forces with those conservative positions that rely on the transparency of the objective fact. Ultimately, they are running on the same correlationist philosophy, but, not yet having arrived at the critique of representation, they merely assume that the correct arrangements of facts will lead to a singular history they are happy to call the truth. In my model, taking language out and decentring the subject does not eliminate them either; it puts them on the same surface as all the other stuff that might be concerned with history-making. ‘Concern’ is a key Latourian term here, for what matters to history-makers, the injection of values, is also part of the overall assemblage. History does not make itself without the continual participation of values of a philosophical



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origin or social availability. They are there, overjoyed, at the birth of every new fact, they are there sternly interrogating new claims of evidence. Let’s conceive of history-making as occurring within a political ecology. What that hopes to achieve as a model and as a research practice is the continuation of anti-foundationalism (there are no ‘basic concepts’, only concepts that practically work), the elimination of metaphor in the architecture of the model (e.g. ‘depth’) and the observation of actual relations among objects, concepts, humans and other living things. This is a living and growing ecology where ‘actual relations’ refers to things that are articulated for all sorts of purposes that further the continuation of the ecology. A political ecology of a field like history will ultimately influence historiography because it will allow all sorts of agents to participate in historymaking: technologies, animals, even elusive concepts like ‘atmosphere’ or ‘mood’. We might ask what kind of ‘atmosphere’ also contributed to a renewed interest in Captain Cook in Australia in the 1990s. We might thus experiment with the elements of a living ecology to see what ingredients cause the system to thrive, or not. This approach to history-making is quite at odds with a dialectical model based on the work of negative critique, where humans, with their special cultural attributes (like language), are locked in a to-and-fro debate with ‘the world’ with its supposedly objective attributes. As an example of moving the terms of debate, let me tell the story of my argument with John Howard. After he asserted the importance of learning dates at a national summit on the teaching of history, I then wrote a response in the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘Experimental history won’t change the Battle of Hastings,’ thus called because Howard’s insistence was that students are failing to learn significant facts and that this is the fault of ‘postmodern relativism’.5 I pleaded that it would be difficult to find adherents of ‘postmodern relativism’ and that if one did, they would have no problem with facts. I might have suggested, though, that postmodernism was useful for interrogating some of the certainties of European modernity. Arguing that that period was rich in experimental thought, not only cultural pluralism, but also Einstein was there ‘messing with reality’ in the form of the theory of relativity. I suggested that Howard’s dogmatic insistence on facts was uninspiring and anti-intellectual – nothing unusual there. I argued that what I would like to call ‘experimental history’ is not experimental in the artistic sense – like the writers’ workshop – but radically empirical à la William James, not excluding anything as a possible actor in virtual situation, giving rise to an event. So, experimental thinking opens up new domains of facts: ‘What if there were such a thing as women’s history,’ someone once asked – and a new subject was born. It is a question of adopting a new perspective, as Henry Reynolds said, as he, too, opened up the new field of Aboriginal history,

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making him one of the most influential public intellectuals of the last couple of decades. His critics make him out to be controversial and politically correct. But adding new chapters on Aboriginal history to the Australian story has not had the effect of wiping out Captain Cook, it has simply added something compelling as a story and an argument. Its politics is motivated by justice and inclusion, democratic ideas people generally agree with. Reynolds’s new perspective tells us that Australian history did not just begin with Cook or the First Fleet. ‘What was happening on the other side of the frontier?’ he asked. While he was working in the document archives turning up neglected materials on early colonial life, including massacres, archaeologists also came up with facts that added new first chapters to the human history of the continent, uncovering the stories written in the sands of Lake Mungo, and in thousands of camp sites and shell middens. The experiments also were inflected by new methods and new technology, like tape recordings, which gave us ways of valuing and interpreting the living traditions of oral history. An experimental thought that highlights a virtual field like women’s history or labour history will go nowhere unless the archive and the evidence is there to be assembled and allow the field to actualise and thrive. So, I should reiterate that this is not the textual ‘constructionism’ of the kind a Windschuttle might like to fuse with ‘fabrication’, but construction as an assemblage of lots of real things. Things, however, are strange, and humans’ relations with things have a range of traditionally ascribed magical properties. These take us to anthropology to help us to understand something about the popularity of Captain Cook, about his synchronic ‘spread’ rather than his diachronic links. The structure of the most pervasive myths about Cook relate to him as an historical figure, so the experiment that Katrina Schlunke and I have carried out, consisted, in one of our first moves, in taking him out of history, at least as we talked about the subject, in our preliminary analysis. For indeed, despite the way in which official and popular histories talk about him, Cook has had one foot, as it were, well and truly out of history for a long time, and has spread far and wide in the spaces of culture. When you encounter him metonymically as an Endeavour in the name of a high school in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale, or as a miniature Endeavour in a bottle or as the name of a convenience store, history is not the narrative that first springs to mind. It is something more cultural like a sense of identity or belonging. In fact, as Greg Dening has demonstrated in relation to Bligh,6 one of the best ways to make one’s way into history is via popular cultural consumption, hence, The Death of Captain Cook; A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet, in Three Parts. As now Exhibiting in Paris with uncommon Applause, with The original French Music, New Scenery, Machinery and Other Decorations.7 This must be an English



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celebratory ‘corroboree’, no cold one-dimensional text here; it has all the hallmarks of ritual. There is simultaneous multiple coding in poetry, melody, repetition and choreography, all the elements to make the affective body thrill in sympathy – and remember. We are touched. And this brings us to the anthropological classification of human societies, as proposed by Philippe Descola,8 giving us another way of thinking about the ecology of history-making sites without having time as a founding methodological concept. Contiguity is one of the ways by which humans organise their relationships with things, and in the process, and in the relationship, attribute things with magical power.9 But I am putting this badly, for it is only modern Western culture that has the habit of classifying the things of the world into Nature on the one side and Culture on the other, where nature has its ‘laws’ accessible only to Science, and cultures on the other side are charmingly diverse and vary by mere convention. In the face of Science, they don’t matter for knowledge (but they matter for social arrangements; that is why so much blood has been spilt over religious differences and over history). What I should say is that there are continuities along nature– culture dimensions, and there are different practices for expressing relationships in those dimensions. So, when an Indigenous person says that a certain picture of a sacred tree ‘is’ me, or it ‘carries my power’, she is not saying ‘it is something (out there in the world, out in Nature) which represents me’. Far from expressing the image of some kind of spiritual harmony with Nature, she is not working with a concept of Nature at all. Such a generality, in the singular, is completely irrelevant to her practice. So, when she expresses a particular relationship, it is significant precisely because it does not ‘bridge’ anything. This is what anthropology calls ‘totemism’, a moral and material continuity running between humans and non-humans. In his major 2005 book, Par-delà nature et culture, Descola distinguished four broad ontological cultural types on a world scale: totemism, animism, analogism and naturalism. Totemism (characterising Australian Indigenous societies, for instance) sees the same internal stuff running through the person and their totem, and they resemble each other on the outside.10 Animism attributes non-humans with the same interiority as humans, but they are physically different. This more anthropomorphic category sees a person in a relation to a plant or animal as if that thing were animated by the same spirit. The metonymy of a voodoo doll is an example. Analogism and naturalism will not serve us here; suffice to say that the former describes a social ontology based on ‘cosmic’ systems of correspondences as in many Eastern cultures (e.g. astrology). Naturalism is based on the Western nature–culture divide, where humans and non-humans are composed of the same basic natural stuff (e.g. atoms), but the humans are radically separated from the rest because of their cultural capacities, like consciousness and motivation.

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Let us now take this apparatus into the field to experiment with taking Cook out of history. I want to go to three Cook sites: Kurnell, Cairns and my own little wunderkammer in my office at work. Kurnell, at Botany Bay, Sydney, is an iconic Australian site, ‘the birthplace of modern Australia,’ because Cook first set foot on the continent here, and because the slogans of Sutherland City Council keep reminding us. There is a lot to be said about the contested meanings of this place,11 but I want to use it as a site for two little experimental moves. The first is about contiguity and totemism. Like many Cook sites, it is marked with a monument, sited only metres from the supposed actual landing spot. Visitors can thus go unerringly to the very spot itself. Putting aside the spurious observation that the monument rises vertically in stereotypical ‘totem-pole’ fashion, the monument remains totemistic in the sense that I described because ‘the same stuff run[s] through the person and their totem, and they resemble each other’. This ‘Cook spirit’ runs in that sense through all the sites marked totemically across the world, mostly following his travels. This is not the kind of totem, as in Aboriginal Australia, which marks continuity in a natural-cultural space, where a clan or person ‘is’ also the bandicoot totem. It is a weaker version because it is a ‘totemic marker’, a kind of ‘representation’, but it does much more than signify; its presence is ergative (to borrow a term from the linguistics of Aboriginal languages); it does work because the social vectors converging in it make it event-like. Another title for this paper could have been ‘History as an ergative language,’ because that emphasis would be useful for my conceptual purposes, as in the discussion of ergativity in chapter 4, that history writing is a kind of work that pushes things along. The historian, inspired by the potential difference (an electrical metaphor) between past and present, is not so much representing states of affairs as harnessing energies. There can be no claim that such totemism might integrate Cook into a viable local totemic system. It hasn’t happened.12 Rather this mode of marking Cook’s presence is overlaid with Western semiotics (the icon represents the subject), but the stronger magical connections people are wont to make, I would argue, lie in the contiguity of the site, and the same contiguity is repeated in every trace that has come down to us: Cook’s drinking mug, articles of clothing, artefacts he collected, even a louse collected from an albatross on a Cook voyage labelled under Cook’s name in the McLeay Museum at the University of Sydney. In June 2006, Katrina enjoyed taking me back – because she had been there before – to the Captain Cook Motel in Cairns where there is a huge ferro-cement statue of Cook, still standing there amid the rubble of the now-demolished motel. It is an impressively tawdry example of those Australian gargantuan region-markers: this would be The Big Cook. His right hand, extending out and slightly raised, is opening up imperial space and



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time, the gesture derived as it is from the famous Phillips-Fox painting about the first landing. Now, since Cook had never been to Cairns, this is no claim to contiguity; that magical connection lies further up the coast at Cook Town (Cooktown); rather, I would argue, it is a case of contagion or ‘spread’. Cookiness here is manifest in a different guise. The statue looks like him, enough to make the representation clear, but like so many of the tourist trinkets, or the more diffuse allusions (as in the name of a street or of a convenience store chain), the resemblance is not the issue, it is that the object contains something of the spirit of Cook. We value it for this tokenistic reason, not because it was in a contiguous relationship with him. Objects infected by contagion are animistic in the double sense of the sacred: things named ‘Captain Cook’ project an aura of protection from desecration and at the same time contain a vulnerable essence. As far as I know, the Big Cook still stands there in Cairns, after many debates about what is to be done with this objectively worthless, but culturally powerful, object. I have another little Cook vehicle, brought as a present from Whitby by Katrina, an Endeavour in a bottle. I wonder now about its miniature power as it sits in my cabinet of curiosities in my office. To return to Kurnell for the second historical experiment, I would like to see if there is evidence for proposing that Kurnell is not the ‘birthplace of modern Australia’. When an evening tabloid in Sydney reported something of the atmosphere of defending of a white sacred site under the banner KURNELL’S EUROPEAN SYMBOLS FACING AXE, Malcolm Kerr, Liberal MP for Cronulla, reacted by saying that some proposed changes to the site would be ‘an example of “political correctness”. . . . I think they are downgrading Cook, and there should be a bit of equity in relation to history.’ Then, Mr Kerr added, using the key phrase: ‘Let’s have more credit for Cook’s achievements in a place that is the birthplace of modern Australian culture.’13 It packs a lot in, this phrase about the confluence of place and time, the first place and the first time. Knowing that the Indigenous people were here first, the word modern becomes a pivotal concept, making everything that Cook stood for the bearer of modernity, science and rationality. But could he be sure he was ‘absolutely modern’? Can we be sure that we, today, are similarly the bearers of an unsullied modernity, derived from Europe, the origin of everything that is civilised and superior? To the extent we have doubts about this, that we can be convinced that there are ‘alternative modernities’ in the world, then we have to doubt that Kurnell is such a firm pivot in the arrival of modernity in Australia. Perhaps also the modernisation process has not gone to completion for settler Australians, perhaps it never will.14 We still have ancient European rituals, and are we not barbarous or primitive from time to time, with violence on the beaches, reminding us of Cook travelling the world firing his guns at people across the sands in the heat of the sun?

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And the Aborigines, on what grounds are they excluded from their own versions of modernism, which I have defined as inventive and rapid adaptation to changes?15 A culture is not modern simply because it has been through an industrial revolution or because it has large permanent buildings, firearms, enclosed land and monocultural agriculture or a centralised government. In the scale of world history, are these such great things? Nothing at Kurnell suggests that Aborigines were stuck in the stone age and not always changing and adapting to circumstance, and the records of encounter and the subsequent history provide ample evidence for this. But the key concept, the modern, especially in its pivotal role at Kurnell, continues on its mission to do nothing much more than divide the achievements of colonial Australia from the richness of Indigenous civilisation. As long as history has Man central stage and things (animate, inanimate, natural) as a support act, the kinds of continuities and necessary dependencies among them will be obscured. ‘We’ have always thought and acted in conjunction with things: telescopes and stars, falling apples, boomerangs and platypuses. So, what kind of subject of history might replace that of the figure of the human with a progressive modernist destiny? I have suggested, in a Latourian manner, that matters of concern might lead us to a parliament organised as an ecological assemblage, where questions of what is most urgently at stake – how do all of us decide the ranking of problems? – displace the disinterested pursuit of objectivity. Our new historian is a consummate negotiator in a heterogeneous environment where the historical is often treated as political and as personal, where no amount of objectivity seems to be able to douse enflamed passions. Our new subject of history has found that the power driving history-making is dispersed and multiple, that is, the situation is rarely a clear case of the Self vs. the World, or of Left vs. Right, but one of multiple human and non-human stakeholders putting their arguments. The historical world we build is not, therefore, one consisting primarily of ‘constructed’ representations; it is a negotiable world of heterogeneities. What unites the miniature Endeavour in the bottle with the real ship or the ferro-cement statue with a real human being called James Cook? It is not simply the operation of magic or a leap of faith across the gap that representational philosophies mysteriously construct. That would be lazy as well as magical thinking. It is, in fact, the hard and repetitive work of arguing for, and constructing, the successive stages of equivalence. People do this each time they are prepared to say X is ‘the same as’ X’. This is the kind of work performed by historians when they say that the man Cook and the boat at Poverty Bay in Aotearoa are ‘equivalent to’ the man and the boat that later sailed into Botany Bay. Of course they are the same, you may say, despite minor changes, like the man Cook might be a little more wary about using



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his guns. Without such continuities where would history be? Indeed, history would reside in the narration of the slight differences, and that is what happens in cultural analysis too when its knowledge acquisition follows real and explicit chains of association. Graham Harman makes this explicit in his book on Bruno Latour: It is possible to explain anything in terms of anything else, provided we do the work of showing how one can be transformed into another, through a chain of equivalences that always has a price and always runs the risk of failure.16

The miniature Endeavour can be considered in its relationship with the original boat not as a representation, nor as a relationship of similar objects, nor even as the same content or meaning poured into different forms. I would like to consider the relationship as a long chain of mediation in which work has to be done at each stage. The original boat (itself a translation of earlier boats) no longer exists, so the model-maker would have worked from a picture and then crafted the parts as scaled-down versions for the prototype. These are then mass-produced, perhaps in China, and shipped off to Whitby, Vancouver, Honolulu and Sydney as sites on the Cook tourist trail. The translation work is not just at the level of the artefact, but also in the complex of values attached to the old and new objects. The original boat was good for sailing, exploring, housing a crew, etc. By the time an oil painting is made of the boat, such functional values are stripped away in favour of the capacity to admire, to historicise, to act as a focus for imperial and scientific national will, etc. It is a long way from being ‘the same boat’. Before we can go to the next step, millions of words have to be written, books published, images reproduced and performances enacted to generate the idea of Cook as celebrity. Only then are the conditions set for the miniature boat I own to have the work done on it to make it a commodity, an item in the inventory of a company that has to return a profit margin. It depends on numbers of people buying it, while these people buy it for other linked values; some of those historicising ones, but more likely fixing it within the personal repertoire of the tourist: this little object links to a place someone has been and has the capacity to produce the feeling of nostalgia, or jog the memory, perhaps, of a brief but passionate encounter, ‘a ship in the night’.

Notes 1. Jonathan Rée, ‘Bound to be in the Wrong’, London Review of Books 27.2 (20 January 2005): 20.

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2. Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism, History as Social Memory (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11. 3. Quentin Meillassoux, Après la Finitude: Essai sur la Nécessité de la Contingence (Paris: Seuil, 2005), 18–24. 4. Isabelle Stengers, Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 22. 5. Stephen Muecke, ‘Experimental History won’t Change the Battle of Hastings’, Sydney Morning Herald (31 January 2006): 11. 6. Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press), 1992. 7. At the Theatre-Royal, Covent Garden (London: T. Cadell (printer), 1789). 8. Phillipe Descola begins his Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005) citing Montaigne on a unifying nature and then stating: ‘A few decades after Montaigne’s death, . . . nature stopped being a way of unifying the most disparate of things to become a domain of objects governed by autonomous laws against the background of which a diversity of human activities could indulge their charming displays. A new cosmology was just born, a prodigious collective invention which offered an unprecedented framework for the development of scientific thought and of which we continue to be, at this beginning of the 21st century, the slightly distracted guardians’ (9). 9. I am adapting the famous model of Sir James Frazer. He had sympathetic magic as a general category, with homeopathic (the ‘Law of similarity’) and contagious magic as sub-categories. In wishing to make the distinction between the contiguous and the contagious (which he does not do), I have had to align contagion with practices of an animistic sort (see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York: Limited Editions Club, 1970), 18. 10. Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, 176. 11. Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005). 12. But see Maria Nugent’s interesting analysis of the comings and goings of Aboriginal figures in the finding and marking of whitefella sites. Far from keeping the blackfellas at bay, she demonstrates that on many occasions they are brought back or they come back to the sites for continued interaction and participation in historymaking. From the Aboriginal point of view, could their participation be part of an attempt to integrate the whitefella? ‘Historical Encounters: Aboriginal Testimony and Colonial Forms of Commemoration’, Aboriginal History 30 (2006): 33–47. 13. As quoted in Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004), 6–7. 14. Muecke, Ancient & Modern. See also, ‘“I don’t think they invented the wheel,”: The Case for Aboriginal Modernity’, Angelaki 9.2 (August 2004): 155–65. 15. Muecke, Ancient & Modern, 5–6. 16. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009), 15.

Chapter 10

Speculating with History The Wreck of the Sydney Cove

The fifth Biennial International Conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia took place in Goa in early 2010 in a charged political atmosphere.1 Delegates to ‘India and Australia: Negotiating Change’ were nervous because of extensive media reporting of attacks on Indian students in Australia from late 2009. More generally, feelings had been running high. In cities in both countries, there had been major demonstrations and in India effigies of Australia’s prime minister had been burnt. It was with these contingencies in mind, including the fact that all the delegates at the conference had some stake in the relation between the two countries, a relation on which we all traded our risky or not so risky ideas, that I had begun to write, speculatively, about a historical event that linked the two countries in the early colonial period. I decided to tell a story of one of the earliest contacts between India and Australia. It involved a speculative cargo, a dramatic shipwreck and an overland adventure. My narrative did not have the intention of carrying a stock of known and definite values from one place to another, but wished to attend to the transformations values undergo by the time they get to their destination. Nor am I here going to deliver a fixed transmissible content, I began telling the audience in Goa, but negotiated understandings continually offered by the story. Negotiable relations, between countries as much as individuals, are not communications, where a content is sent down a telephone line, as it were, and emerges intact at the other end; rather, they are made up of hazardous and rewarding journeys where there is much to be lost or gained, where powers are enhanced or diminished as one goes along. This is the alternative kind of ‘cargo’ with which I see knowledge creators dealing. I like to see us as proceeding with an ethic of speculation that reflects on the participation of people and things in a matter of concern, where each actor earns its right to participation. 103

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The colony at Port Jackson, New South Wales, was only two years old and struggling for survival when, in 1790, the governor was given permission to obtain supplies direct from India.2 The Atlantic was dispatched to Calcutta in October 1791, returning with a cargo of food and livestock. This spurred private trade to Australia, known as ‘country trade’ (i.e. the trade not controlled by the Foreign Office in London or the East India Company) in the Indian Ocean: The first private merchant vessel to arrive at Port Jackson from India was the Shah Hormuzier in February 1793. . . . In the three decades after the appearance of the first country ship 129 vessels carrying cargoes from India, totalling over 30,000 tons of shipping, arrived at New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). This represents close to 35 per cent of the total number of overseas shipping arrivals at Australian ports before 1820 and is exceeded only by government vessels sailing directly from Britain.3

This is how the Sydney Cove, the subject of my story, came to be dispatched with its ‘speculative cargo’ – as they called it – by the agency house of Campbell and Clark in Calcutta on 10 November 1796. Picture the Hooghly at the end of the eighteenth century, with the Sydney Cove at dock being loaded. Once known as the Begum Shaw, she has been renamed in honour of her new destination, but has retained her Glaswegian captain, the elderly Gavin (Guy) Hamilton (eighty years old, according to the fictionalised version of Max Jeffreys). She was constructed in Bengal; the timbers recovered from the wreck were mostly teak, sissoo and Indian rosewood, and the riggings were coir rope. Three-masted, two-decked and a hundred and thirty feet long, she was described as ‘5,000 bags of rice burthen’.4 Captain Hamilton had assembled a crew of eight Europeans and forty-four lascars, as the Indian seamen, usually Muslim, were called. William Clark, of Campbell and Clark, would travel as supercargo. Campbell and Clark were already involved in the spirit trade, with sugarcane and rum having been developed as an industry in Bengal by that time. So, over 30,000 litres of alcohol took up a large proportion of the cargo, which also included rice and sugar, tobacco, salted meat, Chinese tea and porcelain, tar, vinegar, soap, candles, shoes, Indian textiles, livestock (some Zebu cattle and one mare) and luxury goods. The huge quantity of rum was for raising the spirits of the nascent economy of New South Wales, an economy that would be run, the myth tells us, on the bartering of rum rather than coinage; Governor Bligh’s attempted reform of this trade led to the famous Rum Rebellion in 1808, Australia’s first and only military coup. Rum, then, became a significant part of the ‘country trade’ that had sprung up among colonies around the Indian Ocean. Rum was a typical tipple for colonial Bengal, depending on the kind of climate that can support



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sugarcane, and so it extends through the Caribbean as well. It is also a seafarers’ drink; mixed with lime juice, it is called ‘shrub’. So, what have I established so far? That speculative trade was at the beginnings of the India-Australia relation; that this was an intercolonial relation based on common experience: seafaring and the tot of rum, tropical climates and the eventual growth of sugarcane and rum in Australia as well – all in all, the beginnings of shared knowledge, technologies and cultures. This leads me to take a critical view of Geoffrey Blainey, whose 1966 Tyranny of Distance was so influential that the phrase is still in household usage. The book did much to focus attention on the relationship between the new colony and Britain as ‘home’, to the exclusion of the earlier-established colonies between. Blainey wrote, ‘There were some years early in the nineteenth century when Australia seemed to be a satellite of India as well as a colony of England.’5 It is a somewhat reluctant admission, although he reports the frustration of English merchants who were being beaten to the Sydney trade by the country traders from Calcutta, making money with staple foods, household goods and the famous currency, rum. So, we have to wonder if the distance that really mattered to Australia was the ‘12,000 miles from Western Europe’, or had that ‘tyranny’ already been defeated by the trade from the sub-continent? But this is not really what I want to do with history, correcting an imperial bias with a more postcolonial one. There are alternatives to a ‘balanced’ factual history that claims a certain innocence from ideology and also to versions of critical history that take up the battle from positions identified as marginal. What I want to do with history is experiment. Not with these distanced (historical) positions on the past event as it took place within a uniformly changing time (this could be called the historical reduction) but, in the vitalist spirit that looks to the ‘life’ of the event. (‘The event makes the difference: not in space and time but to space and time.’)6 In this conception (an experiment with the event to see how it has changed time and space themselves), the voyage of the Sydney Cove would have made India and Australia become both co-temporaneous and closer together spatially. The imperial chronotope would have always put the ancient civilisations of India and Australia both behind a modernising Britain and at different stages of backwardness. In that sense, Blainey’s conceptualisation of a ‘tyranny of distance’ was his spatiotemporal formulation along that imperial chronotope. This included an historiographical attitude. His tyranny, as it were, and that of much conventional history, is that of keeping a critical distance on events, where the omniscient narrator sits in a virtual London. In recasting the key India–Australia relation as intercolonial and occupying the same time and regional space, I am perforce experimenting with a less distanced, more intimate history, allowing a less ‘imperial’ and more reciprocal and negotiated relation.

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The difference that is constituted by any event is seen here as the life of the event, that is, all that is not subject to one reduction or another: to the historical, to the social or to the economic as privileged foci. The Sydney Cove that embarks from Calcutta can be seen more expansively as an assemblage of life; humans, animals and other living things (like Bengal hardwoods or sugarcane) rendered by labour into planks to make the ship, or rum as cargo, spirits that are destined to ‘enliven’ the colonists in New South Wales. Life, in this non-reductionist account, is made up of the multiplicities of things, humans, concepts, as they come together with a capacity to act and an even greater capacity to act together. Nor is life limited to ‘life on board’ the Sydney Cove; the life of the vessel extends even to Port Jackson as the somewhat abstracted destination pulling the voyage onwards. For the average crew member without the imperative of profit at the destination, there is the pull of the voyage itself; once embarked one must keep going, spurred on by officers and shipmates, even in the face of the most difficult life-threatening conditions. Once one signs on, for whatever imperative, there emerges an attitude of assent to the unfolding possibilities offered by a voyage. To stay at home, to say ‘no’, is to be less alive in this sense. But death would accompany this voyage to the south. Of the fifty-three on board, not many would make it to their destination. This ship encountered gale force winds in the fifth week of the voyage at fifteen degrees south in mid-Indian Ocean, and a leak sprung on the bow. After another five weeks, on the 25th January, further rough weather opened the leak. Five lascar seamen died from a combination of scurvy and exhaustion with the continual pumping. By the 8th of February, ‘the gale now increased to a perfect hurricane, with a dreadful sea’7 as they rounded the tip of Tasmania, and the next day the captain finally ran the ship aground in the Furneaux group of islands in what would become known as Bass Straight. The bad weather would continue until the 1st of May. They called the island on which they landed Preservation Island, doing the best they could with the ‘continued storm, with thunder, lightning, rain and extreme cold’.8 They rescued what they could from the wreck, and the rum supplies, after being abused by some of the crew, had to be removed to a nearby island, which appears on maps today as Rum Island. It was decided to seek help by dispatching the long boat to Port Jackson. It was re-equipped for the open sea and departed on the 27th of February with Mr. Thompson, chief mate, the supercargo William Clark, three European seamen and twelve lascars, seventeen in all. But the weather was still bad, and the long boat was wrecked on the 2nd of March in the surf near Cape Everard at the south-eastern tip of the continent. They were still 600 kilometres short of their destination, there were no other settlements and they were apprehensive about the ‘unfrequented deserts’ and ‘barbarous hordes’. Yet, they



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continued in that vitalist spirit that makes people assent, by necessity, to the conditions provided: ‘the dangers that surrounded them served but to excite them to exertion; they resolved to brave every difficulty’.9 This is a history, and a story, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s storm of history ‘blowing from Paradise’10 as if the forces of the world – weather, distance, lack of food – were conspiring against the poor human lives extending themselves here. Yet, Clark kept writing, with a pencil, producing memoranda that he would eventually publish in the Asiatic Mirror, Calcutta, on the 27th of December, 1797 and the 10th of January, 1798. His Australian adventure that had begun in Calcutta would be taken back there, as an exemplary intercolonial story, for the telling. Clark’s evidence builds up a picture in which there was ultimately no fear to be had of ‘barbarous hordes’; they met very little hostility on the part of the locals. In fact, they received much more help. Here is one example: We came to a pretty large river, which, being too deep to ford, we began to prepare a raft, which we could not have completed until next day had not three of our native friends, from whom we parted yesterday, rejoined us and assisted us over. We were very much pleased with their attention, for the act was really kind, as they knew we had this river to cross, and appear to have followed us purposely to lend their assistance.11

On several occasions when the locals greet the travellers, the Aborigines help them by giving them food, and then follow them out of hospitality or curiosity, and then help them once again. On the 16th of April, he writes: We once more met with our friends, who, a third time, conveyed us over a river at a shallow part, which they pointed out. On the banks of this river we remained for the night.12 Our poor unfortunate companions, worn out by want and excessive fatigue, now began to drop behind very fast. At this place we were under the painful necessity of leaving nine of our fellow suffers behind, they being totally unable to proceed further; but we flattered ourselves they would be able to come up with us in a day or two, as we now often stopped some time with the natives when we found them kind to us, or loitered about the rocks to pick up shellfish or collect herbs.13

These nine Bengalis might have found that the historical winds blowing from ‘paradise’ had founded a new paradise on the south coast of New South Wales, with ‘natives’ prepared to help them successively three times, on this occasion giving them food and inviting them to their camps. The Bengalis were never heard from again. In imagining conviviality over meals and shared skin colour, added to all of Clark’s evidence of friendliness in showing the country and what it had to offer, I am willing to speculate that

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they integrated with the locals and, who knows, may still have descendants in Australia today. When the few men who continued on felt the lack of this local assistance, they were in serious trouble, as the following extract from the journal notes: ‘April 23rd, 24th, 25th – Walked ten or twelve miles each day, without meeting any natives, and wholly without nourishment almost perished for want.’14 Eventually, by mid-May, after walking for two more months, they were picked up by a Port Jackson fishing boat south of Botany Bay. There were only three who survived to finish the journey: William Clark, who told the story, a European seaman and one lascar. That, then, summarises the story from the conventionally human side. Some of the cargo was recovered, along with the surviving seamen stranded on Preservation Island. The remaining rum was sold in Port Jackson. Were these the most important elements of my story? The tale of human fortitude and survival, coupled with the agency of a commodity (that was also a currency) driving traders to speculate? Raw materials like sugar are transformed into wealth, but only through the risks of travel and trade. And on this occasion, Nature (the form of the storm) was the major actor, not the gentler and seasonal monsoon which enabled centuries of Indian Ocean trade, but an actor of different character, the fiercer and more unpredictable ‘Roaring Forties’. Conceived of in Sydney for a conference in Goa, this writing has proceeded to think through ideas on the uses of history precipitated by the exciting development of Speculative Realism. This small school of thought revives a philosophical project that allows itself to talk about the real without embarrassment, and without the qualification ‘construction of’ the real. It is metaphysical – ‘original philosophical thought as a discourse on the nature of reality’15 – yet anti-foundational, for it wishes to explore the complexity of relations among heterogeneous and hybrid things that constitute the assemblages that function in the world, pragmatically, yet remain amazingly precarious existences. It is anti-foundational because this metaphysical realism does not ‘depend on [any] kind of transcendental guarantor’, be it deity, mind, perception or logic. I want to take the risk of adding two more senses of speculation to this interdisciplinary project. There is philosophical speculation, then, which involves proposing (risky) ideas in the context of a particular realist school of thought, but also capitalist speculation, risk-taking in the marketplace, which this chapter has explored with a real historical example. There too, in the elaboration of an historical discourse, lies speculation of another sort, which is the movement of interpretation and imagination based on the contingencies of the present – one writes history for those reading it now. The ‘past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history’,16 says Benjamin,



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emphasising history’s vitality as it continues to engage with the public feelings of the present. My point is that anyone who engages with history has to have an argument ready to account for the work one performs and one to justify one’s involvement in one historical event rather than another. I argue against the ‘critical distance’ that seems to offer, unearned, the privilege of either neutral overview or political vanguardism. My argument for participation in history has an allegiance neither to the discipline of history itself nor to some counter-society of cultural critics bent on reforming it. The more intimate realist history I have proposed does not have a universal truth to offer. It suggests, more modestly, the performance of a local engagement between Goa, India and Australia, a relation ‘rising in the sky of history’ that rose once before, but was forgotten, just like the nine lascars from the Sydney Cove, who, I am willing to speculate, found paradise on the New South Wales south coast, and a particular intercolonial historical line came to an end, at least until now. Notes 1. Fifth Biennial International Conference of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (IASA) ‘India and Australia: Negotiating Change’ 18–21 January 2010 at Goa University. 2. Kieran Hosty notes: ‘. . . The expence with which the conveyance of provisions and life stock from this country and the Cape of Good Hope to the settlement in New South Wales has . . . led his Majesty’s ministers to consider of some plane from obtaining supplies from a situation more contiguous and upon more moderate terms.’ (W. W. Grenville, 1792 as quoted by Hosty) and continues: ‘The colonies [sic] small population, lack of wealth and lack of outward cargo resulted in the British East India Company, which had the monopoly for all British trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, attaching little significance to New South Wales when compaired [sic] to the very attractive markets of China, India and Europe. This unfavourable view of Port Jackson meant the colony could not depend upon a regular supply of provisons [sic] from Britain and Europe and instead had to rely upon vessels from other countries. In 1793/1794 five vessels from the Indian sub-continent, Atlantic, Shah Hormuzear, Arthur, Fancy and Experiment arrived in the colonies with livestock, beef, pork, sugar, calico, rum, flour and leather goods on speculative voyages which were most likely encouraged by the Governor General of India who had been told that the “. . . supplying his Majesty’s colony in New South Wales as well with live stock as with Indian corn and the seeds of vegetables from Bengal is conceived to be a measure which must be highly advantageous to that colony” (Grenville).’ 3. Mike Nash, ‘Investigation of a Survivors Camp from the Sydney Cove Shipwreck’, Maritime Archaeology Monograph and Reports Series, no. 2 (Adelaide: Flinders University, 2004), http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/archaeology/department/publications/MAMARS/MAMARS_PDF/Mike_Nash_Thesis.pdf, 16–17.

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4. Ibid., 17. 5. Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966), 61. 6. Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember and Celia Lury, ‘Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism’, Theory Culture Society 22.1 (2005): 4. 7. F. M. Bladen, ed., Historical Records of NSW, Vol III. Government Printer, 1892. Facsimile reprint (Mona Vale: Landsdowne Slattery, 1978), 758. 8. Ibid., 759. 9. Ibid., 761. 10. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 249. 11. Bladen, Historical Records of NSW, 763. 12. The Moruya river, south of Bateman’s Bay, according to Max Jeffreys’ fictionalised reconstruction, The Wreck of the Sydney Cove (173). 13. Bladen, Historical Records of NSW, 766. 14. Ibid., 767. 15. Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Speculative Realism’, in Collapse III: Unknown Deleuze (London: Urbanomic, 2007), 308. 16. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, 249.

Part IV

Ecologies of Place

Commodification is not necessarily the destiny of all matter. Things come and go from the mainstream economy, when for one reason or another they prove resistant to commodification, banned for moral reasons or promoted irrationally for ideological ones. So much for economic ‘rationalism’! The market is spilling over with all sorts of passions, instincts and habits that it claims have been filtered out from the ‘cold, hard’ modern calculations of level-headed economists and traders.1 Carbon has been the energy source driving the machines of modernisation, but it has come up against the ecological limits of the planet. Global warming and its associated problems has been a real ‘game-changer’ across many fields of the humanities, giving rise to the new field of the Environmental Humanities, in which the following chapters could be said to belong. In each case, the postcolonial dynamic of Europe and its Others is articulated via the way in which materials and architectures fashion spaces that can accommodate certain kinds of thought, while affording opportunities extracting thought along other ‘lines of flight’. ‘Tropical Islands’, for instance, speculates about the reality of dreams in the holiday atmosphere of a tropical pleasure dome in the frozen fields of the Brandenburg plains in central Germany. ‘Berlin Babylon’ was written before ‘Reproductive Aesthetics’, so it anticipates the themes of language and reproduction that come to fruition there. ‘Picture that Cyclone’ returns to Broome as it engages with the aesthetic modes of knowing what climate phenomena might look like and be. Note 1. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2013), 386. 111

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The Composition and Decomposition of Commodities The Colonial Careers of Coal and Ivory

Part 1: coal Coal is a fungible commodity because it is almost 100 per cent carbon, but this purity and substitutability is deceptive, for, in its relations, it is unique and even institutionalised, as in the imposition of a carbon tax to offset its destructive effects on ecosystems. Value is added or taken away from it in the process of extracting it from ‘nature’ and turning it into a tradable commodity. My attempt to theorise the commodity will involve engaging with the materiality of the commodity, the stuff that makes it up, like simple carbon atoms. But beyond materiality, I am also interested in the composition of commodities, how they are ‘made up’ in more fanciful ways. In this, the composition of the commodity is hybrid, for it is packaged into a network of relations that move the object around and give it life – vibrancy, as Jane Bennett would say of the ‘political ecology of things’ – particularly in relation to those human beings who are connected with such commodities.1 So, not only is the commodity composed in its being by packaging, desires, functional articulations, ideologies and forces of labour, it is also mechanically reproduced in quantifiable units, and this multiplication of items distinguishes it from unique object-events, and more or less guarantees its distribution, giving each commodity a temporal career. The speed of its movement through space and time, its transportation through markets where it gains or loses value and is traded for other items of value: this is what articulates the commodity with time, it is what makes the two concepts inextricable from each other. But in a second movement I want to attend to the undoing of those materials, forces, signifiers and so on that compose the commodity. As this compositional analysis attends to the elements that make up the hybrid, networked commodity, 113

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it becomes a useful critical procedure for unhitching those relations. This is what I mean by decomposition. For, why should we assume, as is often popularly done, that everything ‘in the world’ is inevitably heading towards commodification, that it is only a matter of time before the next thing in the free-for-all ‘natural’ commons is swallowed up by processes of possession and exchange. In fact, there are processes of decomposition of commodities going on all the time: ‘banning’ (as we shall see with ivory), ‘use by date’, ‘out of fashion’, ‘passé’, ‘antiquated’ (so many are to do with time!). Allen Shelton writes: But what I had ignored, and what Marx had neglected as well, is that commodities cool off, come out of the market, get stranded in space and time, virtually die, become gifts, and are collected into memory palaces surrounded with a different kind of liquid than that which floats active commodities. The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss had to resort to words and concepts outside of the contemporary European frame to approximate this world. He employs a variety of interrelated concepts drawn from the Pacific Islands and Aboriginal Australia.2

Some commodities are more stable over time than others, yet they all decompose into their component parts, eventually, and you can marvel at how they even managed to generate their unity, once you examine all the links and workings. The lesson here is not to assume relentless commodification under the pressure for market-formation, as if capital must always win out. In fact, markets are constantly dealing with processes of commodities turning into other things, returning to nature, as it were. Sometimes, this is because a commodity is deliberately zapped by a counter-spell, as Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers would say, that takes away its aura.3 We shall see later how aligned to colonialism ivory’s career was and how a ‘save the elephant’ environmentalist movement was the ‘counter-spell’ that decommodified ivory and put a ban on its sale, taking it completely out of the legal market. So, it is with this in mind that I would like to turn to the first of two examples: coal and its distribution in the Indian Ocean of the nineteenth century. Coal, of course, along with other carbon derivatives, was the primary resource that energised the Industrial Revolution. It is a ‘mass’ resource, and largely fungible. For global oceanic trade, it became, with the rise of steamships, the commodity that provided the energy to transport other commodities. Steamships were more reliable, supposedly, and in the Indian Ocean, traders would no longer have to rely on the annual cycle of monsoon winds to move things around by sail: The early steamers with single combustion engines required vast amounts of coal. They carried as much as they could, but this meant that they were limited to carrying only mail and passengers, there being no room for freight. In 1856 Ida Pfeiffer went from the Cape to Mauritius in a new steamer, of 150 horse



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power. It cost a massive £500 a month to run, not counting the cost of coal, which was very considerable. The ship gobbled up more than a ton every hour, yet coal cost £2/10s a ton at the Cape. The steamer was relatively efficient, for some of the early steamers used up to fifty tons of coal a day. The consequence was frequent stops at places on the way – Cape Town, Aden, Galle – to pick up coal. In the 1850s Galle imported 50,000 tons of coal a year, most of it coming from far away Cardiff. In these early days much of the coal was taken to these depots strung around the Indian Ocean in sailing ships.4

Fifty thousand tons of coal a year, from Cardiff to Sri Lanka, in sailing ships? Am I missing something here with this story of coal depots? Couldn’t it be the case that this commodity, coal, is also fuelling a fantasy about the domination of nature and about imperial figures in topees showing off their modernity to the natives? And it is true, coal and steamships, initially, did not pay for themselves at all. They were subsidised by the British government by way of mail contracts, because, as historian Michael Pearson goes on to say: It was essential to have means of regular communications between [the empire’s] different parts, so that trade could flourish, security be enhanced, and troops and war material be moved as needed. . . . Very large sums were involved. Between 1840 and 1867 the contracts yielded £4.5 million, and £6 million between 1868 and 1890. Overall the support given by the British government was about 25 per cent of the total capital.5

Technologies improved in such a way that these subsidies could be reduced and phased out, at least for the mail runs, but we still have a dirty inefficient fuel moving large inefficient ships for many years on the strength of a story, a story retold by Michael Taussig, with Primo Levi: ‘I wanted to tell the story of an atom of carbon,’ said [Primo] Levi. What stories they would tell, fairytales and ghost stories like we’ve never heard before. For that is where the story of carbon can take you, carbon, ‘the element of life’, now better known as I write these lines as that which is going to kill us off through global warming. Element of life, indeed! What stories they could tell! Nothing compared with what they are going to tell! To date, this story has been occupied territory and called the domination of nature, but – who knows – if the storyteller got it right, then might not something else emerge? Therefore, if it is the poetry that does the hard work, combining the manmade with the natural so that there is not longer much of a difference, the poetry to which I refer and defer being the join, then I shall abjure the stepwise story, this happened and then that happened, and try as best I can to nudge some of the things-in-themselves into speech such that they manifest their disjointedness no less than their joint.6

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I would say they manifest their composition as much as their decomposition, the things being hybrid-in-themselves and hybrid in the heterogeneous environments that provide life support for them, hybrid markets being a case in point: Economic markets are caught in reflexive activity: the actors concerned explicitly question their organization and, based on an analysis of their functioning, try to conceive and establish new rules for the game. This reflexivity is evident mainly in the proliferation of hybrid forums in which the functioning and organization of particular markets . . . are discussed and debated.7

So, that is one kind of story about the composition of the commodity, in this case coal, where part of the composition – a rhetorical but essential part – is a narrative about industrialised modernity. Without this story, coal would not be able to sustain itself in the market. But of course, I have only looked at early steamships. Carbon, the ‘element of life’, has found its new source in its cousin, oil, and is now in everything we use; all sorts of consumable energy, plastics, chemical products and so on. Carbon itself may not be decomposable, but its individual products are being decomposed in a piecemeal fashion; the campaign against plastic bottles, for example, that links to the commodification of water.8 Part 2: ivory Picture this: a group of elephants in the Roman Circus Maximus about fifty-five BCE facing death at the hands of the gladiators. For the Roman consul Pompey the Great, the animals provided a spectacular theatre of cruelty. But they turn to the crowd for help, and Pompey faces a kind of popular revolt, as reported by Pliny the Elder: Pompey’s elephants, when they had lost all hope of escape, tried to gain the compassion of the crowd by indescribable gestures of entreaty, deploring their fate with a sort of wailing. So great was the distress of the public that they forgot the general and his munificence carefully devised for their honour, and bursting into tears rose in a body and invoked curses on the head of Pompey for which he soon afterwards paid the penalty.9

Here, the elephants exhibited the charisma of the large mammal that links them in an affective chain to humans in a similar way to the way they are linked today, a way that saved them yet again. By the twentieth century, elephants will have survived the ivory trade, which burgeoned through



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the colonial period transforming a natural substance (elephants’ teeth) into a cultural one (ivory), a ‘primitive’ resource into a complex set of commodities with a diverse array of functions and meanings. As we shall see, affect was a key element in the composition and decomposition of ivory as commodity. Ivory, in this process, was transformed in the course of what I would like to call its political career. Ivory is not just a ‘natural substance’, it acquires a second nature in its relations with other things and other beings. Further, these relations give it an agency, and the complex of relations intersecting create a particular character for that agency, hence the politics.10 So, ivory was never passive: only a complex disarticulation and rearticulation of its relations to other beings and things can turn it into a passive substance, passive to the will of human beings to procure, distribute and craft it. To make ivory, one has to first disarticulate it from elephants, those very beings whose articulateness saved them, apparently, in Pompey’s circus. ‘Tusks’ have to be translated into ‘ivory’. The elephant – let’s start with the elephant as a composed being – uses its incisor teeth to dig for water, strip bark, move things around, poke enemies and display for courtship. Tool-like, the tusks already seem to extend the purely natural (except there is no such thing as the ‘purely natural’, everything is evolving and changing subject to forces, some of them affective). Because the elephant uses its tusks to articulate relations, the political career of ‘ivory’ has already begun: tusks are part of an elephant’s power, if you like. After the hunt, this power is wrenched away with their teeth, and the political career of ivory continues. But does this go in a straight line, from the so-called natural to the cultural, to the worlds where human mammals compose things for their advantage? It is important, I think, not to see this as a one-way street, from nature to culture, primitive resource to complex commodity. Because if my story only makes one point, it will be that ‘nature’ will return to give the elephants a voice (trumpeted by human advocates), a voice demanding elephant survival. The story will participate in the turning around of ivory and its political career, changing its configurations of value. Clearly, that value is not made by raw material alone, but also by the magic of the stories spun about it. Matter thus ‘vibrates’ in the liveliness of its relations; while our lives are also crafted into matter: all beings, all things have their political spokespersons gathering alliances to their causes. I am trying to grasp the wonder of ivory here, taking the risk, like Bruno Latour, like those misguided medieval folk, or primitives, who believe ‘in a world animated by all sorts of entities and forces instead of believing, like any rational person, in an inanimate matter producing its effects’.11 This is a rationalist reduction, which is starting to look even stranger, because it treats objects as if they are dead, while our actual practice

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is constantly to take them up in lively relations, as Jane Bennett argues in her 2010 book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Ivory was initially wrested from elephants in an atmosphere of fear. Early Ethiopian hunters used poison-tipped arrows shot from powerful bows and they supplied the ancient Middle East and Europe with ivory. Some African tribespeople were traditional elephant hunters, but they took risks: a wounded elephant could trample people in a hunting party, and such risks continued through the colonial period, even when big bore elephant guns became available. Human fear and elephant fear and rage characterised the theatre of the hunt. Then, there was the slaughter and butchering of the elephant’s head, cutting back into the jaw so that the invisible one third of the tusk could be wrenched out by several men with a final great creaking pop. When this is done on a large scale and the elephant meat ignored, then the extraction of ivory starts to look, well, inhuman. Killing fields, especially in the early seventies when the price of ivory increased tenfold.12 An affective relation of man to elephant is then further reproduced in the inhumanity of man to man, in the cruelty of slavery. The value of ivory now being forged in human as well as elephant blood; the porters of tusks who stumbled on their way to the Ivory Coast would be left to die and replaced by others. That slavery is sometimes called ‘black ivory’ is no accident. These were the two great commodities being extracted from Africa from the precolonial through the colonial periods. This was a harvest of death as well as ivory, ‘an animated image of death’ is how Conrad describes Kurtz being carried out on a stretcher towards the end of Heart of Darkness, ‘an animated image of death carved out of old ivory’. Yet, the substance, the very qualities of the material of ivory, made it such an object of desire that all these lives could be sacrificed in abundance for its extraction and global distribution. It is ductile to carve, highly durable, strong, a beautiful creamy white and sensually smooth to the touch: these are also lines of affect that relate it to humans, human industry, human ritual. Death sanctifies this process of transformation of elephant dentine into beautiful panels carved by Romans, thrones for ancient kings and queens, a huge number and variety of artefacts amplified after industrialisation in Europe. The sacrifice imparts a magical quality to the substance, then further enhanced by its refashioning into cultural objects, of which more anon. But ponder Conrad again: ‘The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.’ Hunters, traders, middlemen, all driven by a lust for wealth, sure, but it is more than Marx’s ‘primitive accumulation’: ‘they were praying to it’, says Conrad. It was like a perverse religion without a church where the parishioners become the carcasses of elephants and slaves, and the office-holders are the white hunters driven mad by obsession, the very meaning of obsession being that any subtle values fall away. Single-mindedness reduces the



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complex of relations that matter, like a certain rationality hell-bent on making objects inanimate. It is a mad story, is it not? Born of death, ivory takes on a life of its own ‘as a product readying itself for the market’.13 It has its own inherent qualities, to be sure – ductile, durable and smooth – and in its various lifelines, its political trajectories, its liveliness will be enhanced by all sorts of other cultural transformations and connections. And at each turn affective forces give the relations a vector. So, how do you sell ivory? Or to be more in tune with our idea of lines of transmission of affect, what does it feel like to trade and sell ivory in the colonial period? We know something of the fear of the hunt, and the horror of the dead who have never been counted, the people even less than the elephants. Now the ivory arrives in the godowns of Zanzibar or Mombasa for distribution around the world. Here, the experts class it into types, with loving caresses of the smoothness of the material. The experts know how the ivory can be cut, they look for the Schreger pattern that only elephant ivory has: a delicate pattern of loosely woven lines, ‘like stretched netting or soft circumflexes’,14 a ‘weave of intersecting lines reminiscent of fussy banknote engraving’.15 The expertise is elaborated in discourses, animated by the same love of the stuff that makes its Japanese carvers serenely happy and makes it preferred to this day by piano players who feel its warmth, sweat-absorption, the slight adhesion of fingers on keys. At this stage of ivory’s history the pianist is not thinking of elephants or slavery: ‘The animal product and its source species occupied different worlds,’ says John Frederick Walker. ‘Ivory was being removed, transported, and reshaped far from its “original ecological context,” allowing the elephant to become conceptually distanced, even uncoupled, from its own teeth.’16 Ivory billiards balls became ‘vital to the game’ by 1700 in Europe, replacing the hardwoods used earlier. ‘Ivory was the only material that had sufficient elasticity or resiliency – “life” as it was called – to permit the full range of physical interactions between colliding balls.’17 That satisfying click as they strike each other. Billiards put a premium on small tusks, ‘scrivelloes’, from female elephants usually; a set of premium billiard balls was offered for sale in 1908 for $176, and by 1922, it was estimated that 4,000 elephants a year were being killed for the trade. And by 1913, the United States was importing two hundred tons of ivory annually simply for the thin facings on piano keys. What else was ivory crafted into? ‘Doctors’ ladies’, Chinese figurines of naked women used by female patients too modest to use explicit language with their doctors, Japanese Hanko, or business seals, combs, straight razors, ivory chudas [bangles] for Hindu marriages, boxes, elaborate decorative spheres within spheres, parlour bell pulls, Victorian cane heads, knitting

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needles, chopsticks, ivory dust for black paint, handles for ham bone holders, cucumber saws and grape snips, backgrounds for miniature painting, dominoes and dice, rulers, knobs for scientific instruments, Chinese cricket cages, cuff links, false teeth, hip replacements, dildoes. Ivory was the plastic of its age. Nancy Cunard, the jazz-age shipping heiress, was photographed by Man Ray wearing massive clunky ivory bangles. She was disinherited for her affair with a man of African descent, as the artistic elite of her generation pursued its exoticisation and eroticisation of Africa in the early twentieth century. The title of the photograph, ‘Ivory Shackles’, is perhaps an ironic comment. The erotic is one of the strongest forms of investment of affect in the commodity, and for ivory, it extends, in the Western canon, from the Song of Solomon’s ‘thy neck is as an ivory tower’ to Nabokov’s ‘The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita.’18 There is a poetics, then, which is replete with the racial force of whiteness and purity, and more, for ivory as colour is not just ‘whiteness’, its rich allusions assure its embeddedness in a kind of sacred mythology, as in John Frederick Walker’s list: Ivory suggests age, antiquity, importance, dignity. . . . It is the color of diplomas, decrees and proclamations. Ivory is the color of German taxis and the underparts of the largest breed of domestic cats, the Ragdoll. It’s the description given to the center portion of lesions as well as to the rind of ripe casaba melons. Ivory is the tint of the clouds given off when ice water is added to a glass of aniseed flavoured Turkish raki and it the lightest acceptable color of authentic Swiss Grade A Emmentaler cheese. It’s the colour a bride would choose for her gown if she wanted a traditional look for her wedding.19

It can’t be then, as he says, ‘just another name in the color wheel’ because of all this cultural embeddedness. But what he is alluding to is the final change in fortunes and a realignment of affect that took place in 1989 when the ban on the trade in ivory took place. Today, if you search for ivory on eBay, you only get the colour, because trade in actual items is banned. The disarticulation of the lives of elephants and ivory that was in place in the colonial period ceased, as environmentalist discourses were able to re-establish the link, forged by that powerful feeling of compassion for the charismatic species. I won’t go into the role of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in bringing about the ban, the debates about illegal poaching, the rise in elephant numbers and the postcolonial arguments about Western environmentalist lobbyists who put elephant lives ahead of the needs of farmers in Africa whose crops and lives are threatened by uncontained elephant herds, not to mention the tons of vegetable food needed to sustain elephant populations which can wreak havoc in African national parks. There are stockpiles of ivory that some African countries seek to sell



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for the monetary value alone, but some environmentalists want to deny them this right for the sake of elephant numbers. Without affect, there is no doubt that the de-commodification of ivory would not have taken place; it was a complex of affects: compassion, outrage and some moral righteousness, most of it coming from the West. The colonial configuration of power that gave us the ivory trade is still largely in place to the extent that African voices are not heeded, for instance an African politician’s offer to those advocating a total ban on ivory. ‘Sure, you can burn our ivory stockpiles, if you pay for it.’ An offer that is yet to be taken up. John Law, of the Latourian school of thought, has made a case that the expansion of European economic power via oceanic trade in the sixteenth century can only be understood if the ‘technological, the economic, the political, the social and the natural are all seen as being interrelated’.20 And now we would have to add the affective to that list. And we would have to wonder what kind of writing (or methodology) can incorporate the technological, the economic, the political, the social and the natural and the affective in the one text, and we might have to conclude that, because of the affective, the text would not only be interdisciplinary, but also novelistic. We are familiar, now, via Latour and the ANT school, with the democratising tendency to welcome the agency of things into human networks and to dismantle the proscenium which has Man playing out various cultures on a stage with Nature as a uniform backdrop.21 So, I have highlighted ivory and given it a career, which is to say a kind of life. In being alert to the forces at work in real time in shaping this life, one notices different kinds of agency, which lead me to endorse the idea of objects being animated. Not that they are autonomously alive, but that they are animated in every relationship that gives them function, meaning and affect. What attracted me in the narrative about ivory was what at first looked like a reversal and a return to Nature, as ivory was banned in order to save the elephants. But this about-face in ivory’s career was not in any sense a return. It was a reconfiguration of the natural–cultural assemblage. The political configuration changed to solve a problem; some of ivory’s friends and enemies fell away and it gained new ones. It was decommodified, but not necessarily defetishised as such, because a new kind of sacred that was a strong affective driver was installed. This is, of course, the Edenic conception of the purity of Nature, a concept at the heart of Western modernism: the classical nature– culture bifurcation which, according to Latour and anthropologist Phillipe Descola, and earlier Whitehead and James, has gotten us into so much trouble. So, first conclusion: no ‘return to nature’, just a redistribution of agency, which is precisely what happens when commodities become recycled, creating new materials and commodities (glass is recycled as glass fibre insulation, plastic bottles become cloth) as well as employment.

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My second conclusion is that while ivory’s colonial career moved it into industrialisation and commodification, this modernisation has not necessarily meant decolonisation. Nations in Africa have political independence, but their continued dependence on an asymmetrical global trade in commodities points us to a colonisation continued by economic means. Ivory is an interesting case study in this area because its decommodification left a set of colonial power relations in place, but this time they are organised around the kinds of moralistic arguments driving organisations like CITES; only ‘responsible’ Western countries can trust themselves to care about the right kinds of things. An old colonial moral pedagogy is thus still in place. My third conclusion is about the passions surrounding ivory. I have tried to illustrate their diversity, from the responsiveness of the human hand to smoothness, to the satisfying click of a billiard ball, to the more complex articulation of machines, exoticism, pride in a craft skill, collectionism, exhibiting desires and so on. One last example concerns the development of lathes for turning ivory into beautiful objects. From the end of the seventeenth century, Peter the Great, the Russian czar, had a collection of ivory turning lathes, which he worked himself. Walker tells us Peter the Great had ‘a passion for putting on a workman’s apron, picking up a chisel and spinning a piece of tusk on a mandrel, sometimes far into the night’. The czar turned out ‘goblets and candlesticks, measuring instruments and sundials, openwork pyramids with polygonal stars inside, sceptres, columns, engraved snuffboxes and polygons’. He wasn’t unique in his passion. For some two hundred years, as historian Kraus Maurice has detailed, the crowned heads of Europe – in Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Italy, France, Denmark – spent untold hours at their lathes turning ivory.22 Less Eurocentric examples, stories from China and India, would reveal different sets of passions, with different assemblages of humans and nonhumans. My point is that the passion for ivory takes many forms, and that its poetics is not just in the object, but in the relations that give the object life. Each little enthusiasm sustains ivory in the relations that push its many careers along. The poetics of ivory is not about its powers of representation, though these play a part. The beautiful carved figurine is an image of beauty, but how it got there is equally important as it is created through a chain of transformations. We can follow those transformations back down the line, from display case, to shop, to workshop with its lathe and specialised tools, to the merchant’s trading house, to its transport as cargo, to the trader back in Africa, to the hunting party with its guns, to the savannah and the herd of elephants, to the particular elephant having its tusks violently wrenched out. What is also on that chain of transformations and translations is a chain of human affect being translated, transformed and sometimes reversed.



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I also want to go back to coal, to carbon, the quintessential fungible commodity, the ‘element of life’. It is its relation to fire, its consumption with oxygen that makes it release its energy. This attribute also puts it in a special relationship with human cultures and their use of the transformative power of fire. Fire rather rapidly decomposes things, and we have learnt to harness this energy in machines that work for us. Normally with commodities we have to labour to transform them into items for the market – no less for coal, which, seemingly a simple element, nevertheless has to be mined and transported with value-adding labour. In its decomposition, in its combustion/consumption, it returns the complement with its labour, working for us as an energy source. And with this energy we power our cities where we, lucky ones, pursue our post-industrial forms of labour in air-conditioned rooms with plenty of computers, brought to us by creative invention, not just by the market. Let us remember that the market is perhaps not a Durkheimian ‘total social fact’, but more of a ‘reflexive game’;23 it is a hybrid forum where government subsidies can play the role of promoting a substance like coal against the logic of the market itself (in the nineteenth century) and against ecological logics and calculations (in the contemporary era). It is in this reflexivity that events are open to the opportunities of intervention. There are stories that can be told that are not in the financial languages of market inevitability, as in stories of the domination of Nature bequeathed by the nineteenth century. If we pay attention to the decomposition of commodities and the forces that disenfranchised them, then we become aware of counter-spells that burst the bubbles of capitalist enchantments: the market is not necessarily all-consuming. Stories, then, but also forms of analysis. How can an analysis work as a counter-spell? Not, I think, by critique as denunciation, where the critic is like a disempowered marginal character at the gates of power. Not as an inflammatory critique, but a cooler one that proceeds by way of tracing the relations between things, that decomposes these relations in such a way that decision-making processes are slowed down (rather than rushing to the usual conclusions via the usual transcendent concepts). Combine inventive storytelling with a more cautious analysis, then, in a poetry that decomposes and recomposes things in their lively relations. Notes 1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 2. Allen Shelton, Where the North Sea Touches Alabama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).

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3. Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers, Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. Michael N. Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003), 202–03. 5. Ibid., 203. 6. Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 225–26. 7. Michel Callon, Cécile Méadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa, ‘The Economy of Qualities’, Economy and Society 31.2 (2002): 194–217. 8. Gay Hawkins, ‘Packaging Water: Plastic Bottles as Market and Public Devices’, Economy and Society 40.4 (2011): 534–52. 9. Pliny, Natural History 3, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1940), 19–22. 10. Charis Thompson, ‘When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature: Amboseli National Park, Kenya’, in Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices, ed. John Law and Annemarie Mol (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 166–90. 11. Bruno Latour, ‘An Attempt at Writing a “Compositionist Manifesto”’, New Literary History 41 (2010): 481. 12. Thompson, ‘When Elephants Stand for Competing Philosophies of Nature’, 168. 13. Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? 152. 14. John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009), 24. 15. Ibid., 23. 16. Ibid., 60. 17. Ibid., 102. 18. ‘The hollow of my hand was still ivory-full of Lolita – full the feel of her preadolescently curved back, that ivory-smooth, sliding sensation of her skin through the thin frock that I had worked up and down while I held her.’ Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), 67. 19. Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 105. 20. John Law, ‘On the methods of long-distance control: vessels, navigation and the Portuguese route to India’, in John Law, ed. Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986). 21. Bruno Latour, ‘The Recall of Modernity – Anthropological Approaches’, trans. Stephen Muecke, Cultural Studies Review 13 (March 2007): 11–30. 22. Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts, 76–77. 23. Michel Callon et al., ‘The Economy of Qualities’, 194–95.

Chapter 12

I Had a Dream in Tropical Islands Resort in Berlin. Was It Real?

It is a matter of inventing or discovering . . . positive modes of existence, which come to meet us with their palm fronds, to greet our hopes and aspirations, or our problematic speculations, in order to gather them in and comfort them. All other research is a metaphysical famine.1 — Etienne Souriau

I’m writing to you, Jimmie, because I can trust you, I think, with these fumblings I call writing.2 I wanted to ask you about what’s really real, and what’s ‘just’ made up, like stories we tell. . . they are supposed to have all these powerful effects, like orienting peoples’ desires in that hazardous landscape of ‘getting by in life’. You know, we bring up our children with stories, then, as you say in your book, talking about our friend Mick Taussig: ‘There are abstract entities we credit with Being, species of things awesome with the lifeforce of their own, such as God, the Economy, and the State.’3 BIG stories, equally made up, equally as real as our ephemeral dreams that disappear, like wisps of smoke, when our sleep is interrupted. . . . Tropical Islands Resort is located in a hangar, which sits like the carapace of an insect on the flat snow-covered plains of Brandenburg, south of Berlin. As you approach on the bus that has picked you up from the station, you notice it is surrounded by old WW2 bunkers, some converted into workshops or offices, others falling into ruin. This stately pleasure dome, one of the largest by volume in the world at 5.5 million m3, is some 360m by 210m. It is large enough to contain a tropical rainforest, a sandy strip 200 metres long fronting the ‘beach’ (‘Südsee’), another lagoon, spas, waterslides, villages with restaurants. The atmospheric temperature is 28° with 48 per cent 125

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humidity; the water is kept at a steady 31°, all-year round, 365 days a year. You can live there, I guess, since tents can be rented for the night. When you pay your entrance fee, you are issued with an electronic key, which you wear like a wristwatch. It has the number of your locker stamped on it. So, after we found our lockers, we could store our clothes and valuables and use the key to get through turnstiles. We could buy lunch with it, pay to go on the waterslide or get a massage. We had passed the frontier into a paradise of consumer liberty, for you could never know how much you had spent until the time came to go back through the turnstiles at the end of your holiday. Spend like there is no tomorrow, and the Dow Jones just went down another five points. We installed ourselves on deckchairs at Südsee, the winter sun shone through the plastic roof of the building onto us, it seemed, but the warmth was pervasive, undirected, and we wondered if there were heaters on the ceiling. The restaurant was handy, only three metres away, and the beach was a few steps down. Outside it was 5° below zero, but that information was not flashed up on the electronic screen to our left. The outside was the reality we were supposed to forget, but we could see it through the side windows; snow and ice, bunkers. ‘Like one layer of reality coming loose . . .’, says my Facebook friend, Berndt Sellheim, way over in Sydney.4 And he’s right, reality is what this is all about. Where is reality? What is it? Who cares? P!nk is playing over the sound system, not too loud, but she is still screaming: SO, SO WHAT?
I’M STILL A ROCK STAR
I GOT MY ROCK MOVES AND I DON’T NEED YOU. AND GUESS WHAT
I’M HAVING MORE FUN. . . 

I order another drink, Sebastian gives me that disapproving look; he goes off to the water slide again. I gaze out over the Südsee, to the horizon, about 30 metres away. Above it rises a nicely painted backdrop of blue sky with attractive fluffy clouds. It almost joins the edge of the pool, so that it looks uncannily like the horizon that Jim Carrey ran into in The Truman Show. Patience and I take a walk, through the rainforest where the turtles and goldfish seem to be enjoying the pools. In the tropical village we pass a grass hut café where there is a man working on his laptop, just like he was taking his holiday in Thailand. Coming back along the Südsee, there is a tramp at the far end. The place is not too crowded, so he is on his own occupying two deckchairs. Undisturbed, he sits and sorts through all his junk that he has removed from his bags: dirty rags, bottles, instant coffee and powdered milk (he has his mug), books, newspapers. I’m thinking this guy is not going to be going swimming, but how long has he been here?



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I find out the heat is directed up the walls by blowers, so that condensation does not form on the ceiling. They had to make this modification, because earlier on, there would be little spontaneous rain showers, inspired by the high humidity and the presence of the 30,000 trees in 500 different species. ‘Like one layer of reality coming loose. . . .’ The businessman on holiday and the urban tramp have found their way here, paid their twenty-five euros to get in for the day and are as real as all the rest, but we expect this reality to be less real, totally fake. In the eighties, cultural theorists Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco were enthused about simulacra and hyperreality.5 A simulacrum like Disney World collapses time and space. It doesn’t matter where this environment is, or when. Disney is also Euro-Disney; it is still a ‘small small (Yanqui!) world’, wherever it is, and it never changes. And the hyperreal was about the scandal of the fake, but that depended on the idea that some solid origin existed somewhere, say in Europe, and that was before the killer critique that was delivered to European modernity by the capitalisation of the erstwhile developing world. At that very instant, those origins are not so original any more, the philosophical ground shifted with the instance of the tectonic shifts of the sliding movements of global capital. The Malaysian Tanjong company bought this little piece of Germany for €17.5 million in 2003. The hangar was originally commissioned by Cargolifter AG to build a useful cargo zepplin, the CL160, but the company folded. ‘But what if it is not a matter of two orders,’ I’m saying to Patience as we paddle in the Tropical Lagoon (31.4o), ‘You know the real and the hyperreal, as if there are primary and secondary orders of the real? Like, is a resort at Phuket in Thailand all that different? And this place is owned by some kind of Malaysian consortium isn’t it? Post-colonial revenge on the Europeans? But why only two levels of reality? Why not exfoliating layers, or chains of mediations coming in and intersecting in the place?’ We have lunch, I treat myself to a glass of red and Seb treats himself to another moralising glance. After a while I find myself drifting off in my deckchair, but before long, my granddaughter is tugging at my sleeve (do I have a sleeve?) saying, ‘Look Grandpa! It’s the tramp!’ And there is The Tramp, looking remarkably like Charlie Chaplin, with the big shoes, being chased by a bunch of security guards with truncheons, dropping his belongings as he disappears into the rainforest. I knew he couldn’t last long in this controlled environment. Thank goodness, now I can sleep the sleep of the security-enhanced. But it seems we have stayed for the evening performance. The lights go down, the music, a lovely Schubert lieder rises, and the spotlight follows a man dressed simply in a business suit onto the stage, which is set in the sea just beyond the beach, huts on two sides. He stands silently for a few moments centre stage.

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‘Meine Damen und Herren, Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he then begins, ‘I know that tonight you were expecting the usual native dances and magic show. I regret to inform you that the Samoan troop we contracted for this winter season has declined to appear tonight as they renegotiate their contract. Likewise with the magicians, our negotiators were not able to pull anything out of the hat at the last minute. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” they said, or rather that is what I said. My name by the way is Celuc Sayyid, I am CEO of the consortium that owns Tropical Islands; I am here on holiday myself! Isn’t it great!’ ‘Anyway, I thought I might entertain you with another kind of story, perhaps as strange and as magical as the performances you have not seen. The Dow Jones went down another five percentage points this afternoon, putting the US officially into a recession. Our consortium has investments largely in East Asia, so we are also extremely concerned about the shrinkage of the overall value of another Tropical Island, Singapore, as you know, the financial capital of Asia. It is all fantasy paper money! You know, like that money we burn at funerals. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately; I keep seeing images of burning money. Let me tell you have we tried to make something real here. Tropical Islands is based on real tourist experiences, and a good part of that reality is fantasy. Real fantasies and desires, converted with our labour into real comforts and pleasures. People will pay good money for that, and why not?’ The little girl is tugging at my sleeve again. ‘Look Grandpa! It’s the Tramp again!’ And I look to where she is pointing. There is Charlie rising triumphantly in the Angelus Novus balloon, waving and smiling to the frustrated cops underneath. Before I can decide if this is part of the performance, I am drawn back in fascination to the fact that Sayyid has now put up a spreadsheet and is explaining in detail the various intersecting financial costings. That figure for heating the place, I think a lot of us were wondering about that; I glance at Patience, she and the rest of the audience are riveted. And there is a history to the Brandenburg city’s State investments in the form of tax breaks and various in-kinds. That guy who was working on his lap-lap, I mean laptop, in the Thai Village earlier has it out again, and seems to be making notes. We are getting a financial history of a company going down, or rather ‘belly up’ as they say, exposing its exploding metaphorical guts as it were. There are all these tricks for keeping it afloat, like the elevation trick in the show we didn’t see. How do they hide the wires or props? How much hiding of the wires can go on before the financial fantasy breaks through into the real-world economy? Sayyid is being remarkably frank, to the point that some other suits sitting at a table by the bar seem agitated. He has told us about why the Samoans wouldn’t take a pay-cut for performing their routines; he has told us that what he stands personally to lose is both his bonus and his investments, but his bottom line is that he can retire to a few houses in a resort village on Malaysia’s west coast, where he can have quality time with his family. Tropical Islands. What he



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really loses is the part he plays striding the global stage as the CEO of a major corporation, no small thing; ‘I have a lot of emotional investment there,’ he admits. In a performance! And he takes a bow, strides off stage left. Applause! The audience loves it, not because he has peeled away a layer of artifice to reveal the financial workings, no: we love these financial workings because of their own reality – no, not as basic, boring spreadsheets, but because he has made the story connect with the here and now, and his act is just as vulnerable as the rest. When Walter Benjamin talks about montage, he is thinking of Brechtian performances, with the interruptions of the action qualifying as epic, always working against the audience falling into illusion. Reality, in this, is not twofold; it can be of an indeterminate number of layers, the first layer (or strike, or link – call it what you like) being the one you begin with, your contingent moment. It doesn’t matter when or where you begin, but it will often be with a surprise that marks reality’s entrance. Benjamin says we need to make the theatre work by treating elements of reality as if they were elements of an experimental set-up. [The spectator] recognizes them as real, not as with the theatre of naturalism as complacency, but with astonishment. Epic theatre does not reproduce conditions; rather it discloses, it uncovers them.6

Something is nudging me and I awake to the realisation that I have no granddaughter; she was the surprise guest; she got in for free on the oeneric layer and was enthralled by the hide-and-seek tactics of the tramp. Patience is suggesting we make a move, not to be too late getting home. I say, no, I don’t mind missing the evening performance. So, we have a last swim, shower and go back to the lockers. Then a trip to the shops so Sebastian can get a dry T-shirt – Queen Kong in bra and undies – and we check out and wait for the bus. The excursion to the tropics ends with a fifteen-minute wait on the platform of Brand Hauptbahnhof, out there in the aching sub-zero of the Brandenburg plains: ‘Through caverns’, sings the dreaming Coleridge, ‘measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea’. Notes 1. Etienne Souriau, Les différents modes d’existence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 142–43 (my translation). See also Bruno Latour, ‘Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les différents modes d’existence,’ in The Speculative Turn, ed. Graham Harman, Levi Bryant and Nick Srnicek (Melbourne: re.press, 2011). 2. This was my contribution to my edition of a special issue of Performance Paradigm, 6 (June 2010), ‘Letters to Jimmie Durham.’

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3. Jimmie Durham, Jimmie Durham: Between the Furniture and the Building (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) (Munich: Kunstverein München, 1998), 127. 4. Berndt made a comment about my photo in the album ‘Tropical Islands’. To see the comment thread, follow the link: http://www.facebook.com/n/?photo. php&pid=1298367&id=674009734. 5. Jean Baudrillard, America (London and New York: Verso, 1986); Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (London: Pan Books, 1987). 6. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 2003), 99–100.

Chapter 13

Berlin Babylon

Berlin. Here I’m a stranger and yet it is all so familiar. You can’t get lost, you always end up at the Wall. I’m waiting for my photo at the machine and it comes out with another face. That could be the beginning of a story. —Marion, in her caravan, in Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin]

I had never been to Berlin, and I knew there would be no Wall. I knew language would present no great barrier either. Yet, I spent six weeks going to evening classes at the Goethe Institute in Sydney to prepare myself for a fivemonth visiting professorship at the Freie Universität in Berlin. It was more out of a feeling of the need to be polite than any sense of the absolute need to acquire German, for, as everyone says, the Berliners all speak English, and in any case I would be teaching my Australian Studies courses in English. It is polite, I thought, to have a few words: to make the linguistic gesture from time to time. So, by the time I arrived, I indeed had a few words and could come up with reasonable sentences if given a little time to formulate them. In any case I like to learn languages because of my long-standing interest in that particular medium, whatever it is. Whatever it is? No, I still don’t know, despite years of training in linguistics, learning French and then Spanish, acquiring enough Italian to get by, learning Australian Aboriginal English in the course of field trips in the Kimberley region of Northern Australia. The vibrations of language are the noise of our social body; we produce these noises individually and collectively. They are essentially part of social reproducibility. Yes, our major human task seems to be reproduction, one way or the other, and language is a means to reproduce the sense and sensibility that goes into creation. Through sexual reproduction we create other 131

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beings in our own form, and we also, more mechanically, reproduce texts according to a pattern that is still not fully comprehended. Whatever it is, language is not just structural or functional, nor divided up into phonetics, syntax and semantics. It is also vibration, noise and music; it also attracts and repulses. In this chapter, I want to explore some of the most intimate attractions of language (at the word, the sentence level) and also its capacity for spinning out into myths and stories. You need partner to reproduce, to keep things alive, even to keep a work in progress like learning German alive, so I sought out a Tandempartner in my early days in Berlin, someone for conversational exchange. I met Evelyn Boho through the university, so she became my Tandempartnerin, writing to me saying: Lieber Herr Muecke, ich freue mich, Ihnen mitteilen zu können, dass wir für Sie eine Tandempartnerin für Deutsch-Englisch gefunden haben. We met at the Balzac Kaffeehaus in Steglitz, near where I lived. She was wearing a cute linguistic T-shirt: I’M SO ADJECTIVE, I VERB NOUNS. It quickly became clear that her English was nearly perfect, while my German was still at the kindergarten stage, as we say in English-German. What could I offer? I gave her advice on improving her accent: ‘Just fake it,’ I said, ‘like, there’s no point in trying to be yourself if you want to improve your accent in English, you have to perform the kind of English accent you like. Actors do it all the time. So the more you practice performing the English-speaking version of yourself, the more it becomes second nature and, and hence, nature. No one could tell anymore if you are faking it. In any case, it’s sexier. Sorry, what I mean to say is, you sound more confident.’ Our social order, that we reproduce via language, is something that is performed and maintained rather than given in advance. Evelyn and I danced around and negotiated our awkwardnesses over language, but more importantly, attraction/repulsion, like is there a hidden agenda? Will this partnership last? And so on. I find out she is unemployed, that she came from Prague as a young girl in that famous 1968 Spring. Three sessions later I’m showing her family photos on my laptop and after that the partnership lapses. Too much information and not enough reproduction? For me, it is not a question of language representing the world, as if we (and our language) are over here waiting to intervene in the already-real over there, rather each intervention is into a negotiable reality and these realities are multiple. Different kinds of practice, even different styles and performances, constitute different worlds. It is in this spirit of engagement with the multiply real, where each engagement furthermore engenders some kind of reproduction, that I venture into a major international exhibition at the Pergamon museum, Babylon: Myth and Truth. Visitors pause in front of the marvellous image of the Striding Lion in turquoise and orange-baked tiles. It was brought from Iraq in the early twentieth



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century, part of the Processional Way which led out of the ancient city of idolaters through a massive gate named for the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war, Ishtar, whose symbol was the lion. Each year, during the celebration of the great New Year Festival, the images of the city’s deities were carried out through the Ishtar Gate and along the Processional Way past some 120 guardian lions such as this one to a special festival house north of the city. This was all part of the accumulation of treasures brought to Europe by cultures newly obsessed with antiquities. While some scholars worked on artefacts, others investigated, and then mythologised via comparative philology, the origins of the European languages back down the Indo-European tree to Sanskrit. Babylon was one of the crossroads of this linguistic history, and here in the museum the roads cross again as the ancient is layered with the contemporary, literally on two levels: ‘Myth’ and ‘Truth’. The floor above presents various creative departures on the Babylonian mythologies: Myth begins with a video installation ‘Zid/Wall’ by Danica Dakic from Sarajevo. Sixty-four close-up shots of lips moving feverishly, telling different stories in as many languages. The cumulative, and fitting, result was babble-on. ‘The talking wall,’ the caption noted rather prosaically, ‘reflects the linguistic condition of our time.’ Two of the major ideas of this Babylon exhibition are that our civilisation is currently going through a Babylonian moment and that it is haunted by Babylonian themes. Dakic’s piece turned on this first idea, while the second came across strongly in a video installation entitled ‘Black and White (Babylon)’ by Douglas Gordon, famous for another film about Zinedine Zidane. Gordon’s piece depicts a buxom 1950s stripper, hypnotically swaying in black and white slow motion. She looks like the Mother Of All Strippers; I’m thinking her style keeps reproducing Ishtar, Goddess of Love or Babylonian whore, depending on whether you follow the pagan or the Christian nomination. Dash Snow, New York graffiti artist–turned bad boy sculptor, had a piece which was NY Times front pages featuring Saddam Hussein decorated with the artist’s own semen. The decadence and waste of the contemporary world, resonating back down the ages! Yet, ‘Truth’ is represented by archaeology, by the whole lower floor of the exhibition, by the magnificent Ishtar Gate, as if it were not already replete with Myth. Why is it so easy to draw that fictional line between fiction and non-fiction, as if there were only two levels for the real to occupy, or one really: Truth and its distortions? A quotation from Wittgenstein is spinning in my head: ‘A whole mythology is deposited in our language.’1 I find I cannot look at a word without feeling the capillary roots of mythology extending down into its history. I can’t read the word ‘salary’ without wondering if I am ‘worth my salt’

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[a. AF. salarie = OF. salaire, It. salario, Sp., Pg. salario, ad. L. salarium, orig. money allowed to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt, hence, their pay]. 
We must plough over the whole of language, Wittgenstein went on, in his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough.’

Key Story I had arranged to get an apartment in Prinzlauerberg, where else? Met the agent in her office on Eberswalder Strasse. When she handed me the set of keys, the largest on the bunch was an extraordinary key that I had never seen before. ‘What on earth is this?’ – showing her the double-headed key. ‘Also,’ she said. And, as she explained, I realized that this was a Berlin story. In a city, surrounded on all sides, you can begin wherever you like. You can begin telling a story right here and now, about any little thing, or big thing. Where you begin is contingent and arbitrary. But having begun, the constraints fall into step beside you, like comrades joining the march. Yes, the constraints are allies! By constraints, I mean the formal limits that are set; could be objectivism, could be something as formal as a text organised as an A–Z. Constraints are also set by practices, because each observation is a selection, each word enchains a syntax, and you are committed to following the experience through to the end, following it through its chain of transformations. This is the logic of the story, as opposed to fictions. Fictions, having encapsulated the experience, lift themselves out of places. They have Aufhebung. Fictions are defined by a transcendent and cosmic being; they create their own imaginative worlds that float off somewhere. But here in Berlin, with Brecht and Benjamin, we feel the pull to follow the thread of experience as it forms that transformative chain of mediations. Berlin is the city also of Simmel, Kracauer and Hessel – all inspired by living in a city which tried out its identities with and against others, a ‘performing. . . unfinished city [which] does not seem merely to perform but to show itself performing’.2 Says Nicholas Whybrow, usefully citing Christine Boyer: As the distinction between reality and fiction becomes an artifice, just one manner of constructing a series of things, ‘we depart from the Euclidean universe of unity, identity, centre, and enter the non-Euclidean universe of pattern, superimposition and differential function. Instead of continuity we have leaps in space, instead of linear time we have time warps that ‘superimpose one part of the pattern on another’.3

‘Leaps in space’ I’m not so interested in. I’m getting on a bit; it is too strenuous a metaphor for me. Rather I want to follow the everyday experience



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and reproduce it so that is has something of the stickiness of that which is memorable. The only way I know how to do that is with storytelling. And just what is this experience? It is not always the same kind of thing. Each bit of experience, each contingency, potentially has a life of its own, a mode of existence.4 It is not all sitting there at the same level, the same substance, objective reality or whatever you want to call it. Waiting for the human subject to come along and give it an interpretation. A world of only two poles, subject and object, would be a fearsome reduction: ‘stuff’ on the one hand and the mystery of human subjectivity on the other? ‘So this Berlin Key’, explains the agent letting the apartment, ‘we call it der Schließzwangschlüssel or “close constraint key.” It is a design that forces people to close and lock their doors, typically the front door of an apartment block, so the same key is shared by that community – kind of socialist, she jokes. Now, look, it has two business ends, see? After you unlock the door, the key must be retrieved on the other side of the door after it has been locked again. The mechanism makes the retrieval of the key impossible until the door has been locked again from the other side. A Berliner locksmith, Johann Schweiger, invented it in 1912, and it was produced by Albert Kerfin & Co; the company still exists, I believe. That was about the time that big avenues were being built out from the central part of the city, with lots of apartment blocks. It saves on having a concierge keeping an eye out for undesirables. Today of course it is being replaced by the electronic keypad.’ I’m thinking this little bit of technology, this clever invention, also builds a morality, by imposing its formal constraint. It is impossible to be irresponsible and leave the door open so any passing tramp can come in out of the snow and sleep in the hof. It is impossible to take your key from the lock until you have bolted the door from the inside. Bruno Latour was so engaged by this key that he called a little book La Clef de Berlin and included a chapter discussing it in his lively fashion. He is imagining an archaeologist of the future finding this strange object and trying to interpret it: Without a demonstration, with directions, she would certainly have an attack of hysterics. These keys that pass through walls are too reminiscent of ghosts not to frighten us. This gesture is so unhabitual [sic] that one can only learn it from someone else, a Berliner, who has in turn learned it from another Berliner, who in turn . . . and so on and so forth by degrees all the way back to the inspired inventor. . . . If our friend were fond of symbolic anthropology, she would have consoled herself for not being able to go in by endowing this key with a ‘symbolic dimension’: in West Berlin, before the wall fell, the people supposedly feel so locked in that they double the number of bits on their keys. . . . ‘There, that’s it, a repetition compulsion, a mass psychosis of the besieged, a Berlin-Vienna axis; hm hm. I can already see myself writing a nice article on the hidden meaning of German technological objects. That is certainly worth spending a cold night

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in Berlin.’ But our friend, thank God, is only a good archeologist devoted to the harsh constraints and exigencies of objects.5

I too am tempted by the symbolic: the double key that opens up the double city, a key that ‘goes both ways’, being symmetrical, that is, more about diplomacy and negotiation than it is about dialectics. But Latour’s satire notwithstanding, he has given me three intellectual tools for my ethnography: objects that are indispensable to storytelling based on a singular experience and the necessary contiguity (or contagion) of the story (‘one can only learn it from someone else, a Berliner, who has in turn learned it from another Berliner’). And thirdly, there is the democratization of humans and things. Stories don’t just circulate among humans, for humans, they are a technicalsocial-moral-metaphysical complex. As Benjamin said about storytelling, ‘With these words, soul, hand and eye are brought into connection’6; stories are rhythmed with tools and labour, or emerge out of boredom (‘the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’7), and the connection with memory: ‘Memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation. . . . It starts the web which all stories together form in the end. One ties on to the next, as the great storytellers, particularly the Oriental ones, have always readily shown.’8 So, once installed in my apartment in Prinzlauerberg, I have had a lot of fun going in and out to get stuff, just so I can use the Schließzwangschlüssel as often as possible, while ‘freedom in constraint’ has become a little refrain in my mind that amuses me. After a couple of days I hear that my friend, the Australian novelist Gail Jones, is passing through town, so I arrange to meet her at the Buchhandlung Café in Tucholsky Str., in Mitte; I thought this would appeal to her literary tastes, since the name means ‘bookshop’. I had arrived early and had a chance to look around the neighbourhood and make a couple of interesting discoveries before opting for a drink at the Buchhandlung while I waited. I tried a Berliner Weisser beer and was informed that this was indeed colourless beer and should be coloured with green or red cordial. There were no books to speak of in the Buchhandlung, though a couple of youths were sprawled on raised platforms and reading trendy magazines. Above the bar, a mechanical contraption made of conveyor belts moved the oars of toy galleons uselessly. Watching this gave me something to do, apart from listening to the conversation of the American couple next to me, who seemed irritated by the world in general. Gail arrived before I had managed to dispose of the embarrassing sweetly coloured local specialty. I whisked her out of there: come on, I want to show you a couple of things. Just up here on Oranienburger Strasse, not far from the Neue Synagogue, this old building has been preserved in its half-bombed state: it used to be the Tacheles Department store. Tacheles is Yiddish for



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‘plain speaking’ ‘or in German Klartext’, adds Nicolas Whybrow, who quips that ‘the only thing that’s clear about this text though is that the story it would tell is by no means over’.9 The exposed walls make the street-scape gaptoothed, where walls are opened up to a gaze inviting new planes of composition, like a canvas, or inviting the cinematography of Wim Wenders in Wings of Desire. But the building, occupied by squatters in the early 1990s, has an interrupted or fragmented structure; stairwells leading to health and safety nightmares for the authorities. Downstairs on the street, they sell T-shirts and avant-garde schmuck, there are nightclubs and bars thick with graffiti and stenciling. The rear, much of it missing, has been repaired in a Gaudiesque style, and there is a workshop in the backyard where clunky steel sculpture is welded together. Now, let’s head back down this way along AugustStrasse; I found this other place that might be good for dinner. In my first couple of days in Berlin, I have discovered, all by myself, an old Ballhaus dating from the 1920s. But having made this discovery it will turn out that everyone knows about this place, and its story will keep cropping up, strangely contagious. But at this early stage, I have this sense of unmediated contact. Here are Gail and myself, standing inside the doorway of Clärchen’s Ballhaus, the maître d is trying to tell us about the place, but we need translation from another couple, a young Berliner with his Brazilian girlfriend. She is radiating southern-hemisphere sunshine in this northern winter; we get chatting, they are thinking of coming back later for dinner and a dance, so are we. And we do, a pizza, Tchechische bier, the music that evening is a DJ spinning rock classics. So, what are these stories you are collecting? Gail is asking me. Well, I already have one. My next-door neighbours from Sydney took me to dinner last night, and their friend from Munich was there. Günther was a chief engineer at a major German firm. On his retirement he decided to go back to Burma where he had done some work and spent a few years. He wanted to help children from the Hill tribes, located in that country rising towards the Himalayas, with their education. So, he set up a foundation, very low key so that it would not draw the fire of the Myanmar authorities. About 120 friends contribute their own funds that are channelled through Franciscan monks in Burma, who then build dormitories and schools so that these kids can continue their education. Günther was advised by a Buddhist friend, ‘Don’t give your money to the Buddhist monks, they will only use it to gild their pagodas; the kids won’t see a penny!’ So, that’s how he ended up in a good working relationship with the Catholics. Meanwhile, for the last thirty years, he has been walking the Alps. Every year he takes a couple of weeks off, and, having started in the far west of the mountain chain, walks a calculated stretch, climbing peaks on the way. Different people join him in different years; guys who know how to rock-climb.

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Günther says he has the wrong physique to be an extreme climber, too lanky. Short stocky people make strong climbers. He has timed it so that he will walk into Vienna for his 70th birthday, at the end of his journey, and all his friends will be there to celebrate. (Tobias Sunday, 2 November 2008) The next week, I meet Tobias, friend of a friend, who was captured by the kind of speech we call a spiel in English, borrowed from ‘play’ in German. Tobias recounted over a beer that he didn’t know he could get so involved in a performance that it would kidnap him. It could have been the dope, but that induces caution rather than recklessness. Very late one night in the street in Prinzlauerberg, an old guy with long greasy hair and a baseball cap, says, ‘Komme! It’s a performance we put on. Komme! Down here.’ What, into a hole? Tobias didn’t want this Faustian invitation into a dirty cellar, dirt floor. But there’s a conversation and because he’s a student and into all that Intellektualismus, the guy is saying yes! Adorno! He was the last, all the philosophers after that are just DJs spinning quotations. Now Tobias is hooked, and when they descend, they lock the door behind them. There is only one candle in the corner on a wooden crate. And the performance begins with another weird person who enters the cellar with a computer and crashes it to the floor; the pieces fly dangerously everywhere. Scary, very scary. The atmosphere thickens and there is no escape. Now, the baseball cap pulls a gun, or something that looks very real, and is pointing at one, then another, saying this is not what it seems, you were wrong, no, right, or wrong? Make up your mind NOW! Who will rise again . . . long pause . . . after the death I can instantaneously induce? The terror persists long after, but the baseball cap is saying now, almost pleasantly, so how did you like it, OK? (The Horsetrough) I walked past Zur Pferdetränke many times on my way home before working up the courage to go in. It is a narrow bar with a spider-web crack low on the dirty front window, just where someone might have landed a kick after being refused credit yet again. Or maybe a more respectable local resident got tough, unable to control his outrage any longer. The window has remained unrepaired for months. Zur Pferdetränke wears it proudly like the clientele wears its tats and piercings: Fuck you if I’m going to participate in your order of things! Ordinary feelings pool up and burst their banks. It might be the same in any city, especially a national capital. These high-density dwellers can be arrogant



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or proud and condescending towards provincials. It’s like an assertion of presence. You live alone, you haven’t spoken to anyone all weekend, and she gives you the wrong bread rolls in the bakery: ‘No! those two, them there!’ You realise you have barked. Her lips go to set position. Eyes flash. You get your change, Ruckgeld, without a word. But that was a little bit of street theatre that you created; it will return to you throughout the rest of the day, lapping in diminishing circles of intensity. It is necessary to create, any way you can, does she realise that? Now, service people are being trained to say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ‘See you next time,’ ‘Shön Abend’. The Berliners are not fooled: they go away muttering, Klishee! Klishee! Originality is necessary too. The Storyteller The great Berliner Walter Benjamin wrote about storytelling like it was a dying art: ‘The art of storytelling its reaching its end,’ he wrote, ‘because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. . . . And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a “symptom of decay,” let alone a “modern” symptom. It is rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history.’10 Secular capitalist society, the novel, information, are what replaces the craft of the storyteller for Benjamin, but I would like him to be wrong. Benjamin says: What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral traditions nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns.11

This is why I would argue that the novel, even fiction writing in general, is a confidence trick, but a good one. It takes our eyes off the ball, the ball being what we can learn from experience. It breaks the chain of experience. It repackages experience as illusion and puts it on the production line to sell as if the literary product itself were so much ore. Non-fiction is outselling fiction because people want real stories again, not the pretty pictures or imaginings of isolated artists. In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin seems to have overstated the modernist break with the primitivist past, for reproduction is and was always in place, with or without mechanical assistance.12 In arguing that language is ‘generative’ (in a reproductive rather than

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a Chomskian sense), I have suggested that each language operation works through the attraction of partners, that language works through such alliances at both micro levels and at the level of the genres we might label Myth or Truth. These stories about being in Berlin have rather suggested a multiplicity of ways language can exist in the spaces of a city. Only if we conceive such a context as nurturing can mythologies continue to hatch from our words. Notes 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, in Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), 10. 2. Nicolas Whybrow, Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 16. 3. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 492. 4. Bruno Latour, ‘The Berlin Key of How to Do Words with Things’, in Matter, Materiality and Modern Culture, ed. P. Graves-Brown (London: Routledge, 2000). 5. Ibid., 332. 6. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 106–07. 7. Ibid., 90. 8. Ibid., 97. 9. Whybrow, Street Scenes, 96. 10. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 86. 11. Ibid., 87. 12. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, 217–52.

Chapter 14

Picture That Cyclone

‘All day and night the wind played ancestor music,’ writes Alexis Wright in Carpentaria as she crafts a syntax whose agency is designed to keep an Indigenous cosmos alive.1 The wind is an agent who plays, and the music belongs to the ancestors, not to humans. Such syntax, and such cosmoi, have accompanied human imagination forever. Europeans revere their classical traditions and gods, those divine and semi-divine beings of Mt Olympus and the rest of the world. Each household has its god, every river, tree, cave and underworld. They revere them as the very origin of the contemporary European cultures they keep alive today. These fictional beings (says Bruno Latour) ‘possess a particular type of reality that it is appropriate to cherish and respect. We have never ceased, at least in our own tradition, to develop, recognize, celebrate, and analyze the specific character of that reality.’2 And yet, another side of us Moderns is only too eager to relinquish these characters as merely fictional, obviously lacking in any truth value: ‘They have been valued to an extreme, while too hastily denied any objectivity.’3 So, where does that leave them, Bruno asks, these ‘creatures of the imagination’? Where do they come from? Well, the ‘human mind’ of course, ‘that famous interiority, that artifact of Bifurcation, the bookend paired with exteriority’.4 We know this is not true because we meet fictional beings socially. We might meet Cinderella as a bedtime story, then later at school we are elaborately introduced to King Lear and Emma Bovary. Far from them being the products of our imagination, they are out there in the world and when we talk of ‘internalizing’ them, what we mean is there are meetings that create aspects of our subjectivities: ‘We find ourselves on their trajectory; we are part of their trajectory, but their continuous creation is distributed all along their path of life, so much so that we can never really tell whether it is the artist or the audience that is creating the work. . . . In other words, they too make networks.’5 141

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And in Indigenous Australia, the ancestor beings have different kinds of networks, modes of appearance and disappearance, modes of interacting with humans. And, the same as in any other set of cultures, these ‘fictional beings’ have full ontological weight; they are real, but in a different way from other kinds of reality. Which brings me back to my titular statement, an injunction to ‘picture that cyclone’. My questions for today concern cyclone imaginaries: What do they look like? What causes them? And what kind of objects are they? The answers to such questions are ‘obviously’ grounded in science. (Science is in charge here, stand aside you gods of thunder and lightning!) But I can also find a completely different set of answers in Aboriginal Australia. It is a different picture. And it is not grounded in the same way; in fact, we might have to use Ben Woodard to question the ‘long tradition’ of the ‘earth-anchoring of thought’.6 A European thought that is in the habit of ‘settling’ itself around concepts of patria, heimat, enclosure and possession that ‘reduces nature to a collection of objects’,7 all dead in the same way, as opposed – I would say – to all sorts of things being alive in their own kinds of ways, ‘living country’ as they say up in Broome. Woodard goes on: It is such images of Earth as both dead body and mute cradle that we set out to destroy with digging machines, massive energy weapons, and total ecological collapse. These images perform a dual criminal function: one, to stabilize thinking, and two, to give gravity to anthropocentric thinking and being.8

The critique of a singular Nature, as carried out by Latour, Descola, Morton and so many other contemporary philosophers and anthropologists, is something I shall take as read. Released from this terra firma, our philosophies can now be shaken loose by cyclonic disturbances at the extremities of which the laws of physics start fraying and calling for new chaos theory-based algorithms in the data-crunching networks of climate-forecasting supercomputers. ‘All day and night the wind played ancestor music.’ And Alexis Wright continues to describe the cyclone that will wipe away the town of Desperance: He became conscious of what the sea ahead was doing once more, and although he knew it was kilometres away, he heard the spirit waves being rolled in by the sea water creatures of the currents, and conspiring with the spirits of the sky and winds to crash into the land as though it was exploding. The earth murmured, the underground serpent, living in the underground river that was kilometers wide, responded with hostile growls. This was the old war of the ancestors making cyclones grow to use against one another.9

Bearing in mind that cyclones might be caused by ancestors making war on each other, let’s consider Dennis Daniels’ account of a famous cyclone as reported by Basil Sansom:



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CYCLONE STORY There was this old fellow who took his wife from Borroloola to see the city of Darwin. In Darwin, the old fellow and his woman stayed in the Aboriginal settlement at Bagot. There the wife met a Darwin man. She went off with this man, joined him in his house at Bagot and said she had become a ‘Darwin girl’. She would not return with her husband to Borroloola. Only magic does this to a woman, making her change over suddenly like that. The husband went back home. He was very angry. He was angry for that woman and that man. One day he sat down and began to sing up that Whirlywind. He was going to kill both of them, kill them both finally. He sang and sang. (He used clapsticks to give the beat for his singing.) He sang the Whirlywind down the river over from Borroloola and out into the sea (off the South-Western portion of the Gulf of Carpentaria). He turned the wind and made it go upward over the sea towards the North. He sang the wind past Groote Eyland. He went on singing. He sang the wind past the Gove Peninsula and there he made the wind turn West. He sang the wind on towards Croker Island. He was holding the wind, holding onto the wind all the time as he sang. Then the wind, that Whirlywind, said: ‘Oh, what’s that?’ Whirlywind had smelt another wind coming from somewhere roundabout. This was a Young Girl Wind and the first wind smelt her underarm smell. The Young Girl Wind was coming from the West. Whirlywind started to chase after her. Smelling that smell, he went really mad. Chasing, chasing after the Young Girl Wind, the oldfella Whirlywind caught up with her. They stayed together in one place; they were over Darwin that whole night. And that’s the way you got all these houses smashed up and those people killed, what whitefellas are calling that Cyclone Tracy. But the whitefellas got the wrong name; wrong name really! Two wind! And all the time the whitefellas were thinking ‘One wind’ and got the wrong name, that Tracy. That wasn’t Tracy. That was the oldfella Whirlywind that was sung up from Borroloola and the Young Girl. Two wind! The narrator brings his story to its close with expressions of great glee interspersed with repetitions of: ‘Two wind, that was two wind really!’ He went on to laugh the more. Then he mentioned tee shirts. In the aftermath of the cyclone that devastated Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, lines of tee shirts were produced for survivors and rescuers ruefully to wear. One carried the legend: Darwin – Gone with the Wind. But Dennis Daniels, narrator of the true Cyclone Story, cited another inscription: What a Night I Spent with Tracy. ‘This one was half right, half right. Some whitefella got it half right. But, really, there were two winds: oldfella Whirlywind and the Young Girl.’ After the laughing, he says: ‘Darwin really got wasted. Wasted. I’ve been looking round. And all those fellas were killed!’10

This story by Dennis Daniels might ‘just be a story’, but Sansom calls it a Dreaming, having no doubts about how it is carefully articulated around Top End politics and religion. Maybe we can call it an historical dreaming,

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about that Whirlywind, about that Cyclone Tracy, where the demonstrative pronoun signals the kind of specificity that cannot be designated by general Laws of Nature. Picture that cyclone. The proper Cyclone Story [says Sansom] gives Dreamings as still those terrible and wilful Powers who, moved by their own priorities and their private, selfcentred calculii of desire, would often do enormous things. An eternal attribute of Dreamings is that, disdaining the presence of humankind, they may be wholly driven by their endogenous Dreaming relationships and concerns.11

Dreamings with endogenous powers that disdain ‘the presence of humankind’. Curious. The Laws of Nature are supposed to do that too. Maybe the Economy as well, to the extent that it has become second nature for the Western Moderns. Let me be clear about the problem for this chapter. In trying to ‘explain’ where cyclones come from – whatever an explanation is – I juxtaposed a scientific account with an Aboriginal dreaming account. Why can’t we just rely on the Western scientific account – we all know that the best explanation for a cyclone is a colourful cross-section mushroom cloud diagram – while putting the dreaming account in the category of strange beliefs and intriguing stories? There is an ontological separation; they are different ways of going through the world and they belong to different institutions: the scientific institution does its reliable work, while the other can entertain us in the museum of past curiosities; we are used to saying that mumbo jumbo has no future, the very definition of science being purification and progressive isolation from past superstition. But if you think that, then you haven’t done your anthropology of the Moderns thoroughly enough. If you think that Science or the Economy can make their interventions in Aboriginal country as isolated tentacles of the Modern, that is, behave only as institutions that do their work efficiently, profitably and rationally, then you have forgotten that they bring their gods with them. That efficiency, profitability and rationality can’t come on their own as it were, but are already accompanied by transcendentalisms large and small. These are costs that reappear on the balance sheet once we conceive of the world ecologically. But if we continue to think of it in a modernist fashion, the world looks open-ended. An institution arrives somewhere and says it is behaving efficiently, at the same time as it pushes to one side all its own mistakes and collateral damage, while also pushing aside other worlds constituted by their networks of institutions. So, have the Moderns successfully sequestered their divinities in church and their fictional characters in literature classes, where they can’t get up to any mischief? Is a cyclone – or more pointedly, the increased



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incidence of cyclones with global warming now that we have entered the Anthropocene – a purely scientific issue? Human agency is playing a part in climate change, but climate still has massive ‘endogenous powers’ that ‘we’ can’t control. This takes me to Tim Morton’s designation of such massive things as ‘hyperobjects’. The hyperobject is a catchy concept – that is, it catches you while you can’t quite catch it. Morton first established it in The Ecological Thought (2010). His new book, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, explains why everyone is affected by hyperobjects, even if they strive to deny their existence. Climate, natural oil reserves, the English language are all hyperobjects in that they cannot be grasped as ‘simple’ objects. Have you ever met ‘English’? No, but what you experience every day are groping attempts to make meaning with words. Whispered lovers’ words and words digitised and zapped across the Internet are materially quite different things, but both belong to the hyperobject we call the English language. Here’s another example: you feel the existence of global oil reserves each time you check, while pumping petrol, how much the price has gone up; and you sense there is something to do with oil in the Middle East conflicts, and how it makes you want to debate the burqa. Hyperobjects are pervasive and don’t allow you to rationally divide and resolve them with our human artefacts called Science, Politics and Art. This is why it doesn’t work to say global warming is a purely scientific issue. ‘The Science is in, folks! And the rest of you should shut up.’ Such an imperative would stop us treating it as ideological or related to voting patterns, or, indeed, related to aesthetics and philosophy. But no amount of science or human willpower can make that happen, because it is already here, says Morton, infiltrating every aspect of existence. Nor can any amount of science provide absolute, 100 per cent proof of causal connections. This gives sceptics and fossil fuel industries the same ‘lack of certainty’ argument that big tobacco exploited in earlier debates. Morton asks how humans will react to the end of the modern world and to the new hyperobjective cosmos. ‘You are walking out of the supermarket,’ he narrates casually, and, ‘As you approach your car, a stranger calls out, “Hey, funny weather today!” With a due sense of caution – is she a global warming denier or not? – you reply yes.’ We have all experienced this kind of hesitation and apprehension about the weather. Innocent conversations about it seem to be no longer possible. Worries about the weather are a mere symptom of something huge, foreboding, and ungraspable in its entirety: climate is a hyperobject and global warming is its apocalyptic avatar. Morton is able to say that ‘the world’, in the old sense, is over because the weather – like Nature – is no longer the neutral backdrop we can rely on to stay put, while we play out our little human dramas in front of it. If the

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hyperobject of global warming is imposing itself radically, and I am convinced that it is because even the deniers can’t stop talking about it, then that old modernist world of human foreground and natural background is gone. And it hasn’t been around for very long; certainly it would look funny to Indigenous Australian philosophers. You are right to get a sense of the ridiculous when you see on TV a sceptical captain of industry debating a greenie minister of religion, as if their opinions really mattered. It is not the absent scientist on the panel that is the real concern, it is that the conceptual architecture of the world they share is the same as it was at the time of the Industrial Revolution, that they still share the same language of human mastery, hope and redemptive adjustment. They occupy the same clichéd world that would picture cyclones as beautiful landscape paintings, one that has forgotten all the violence that went into its creation – not just the painting, but the whole conceptual architecture. I am thinking about the contrast between the photo of the cyclone, with its Turneresque sublime, and this Yukultji Napangati painting that captured Tim Morton when he was here. The cyclone looks like a mushroom cloud, and it feels like 1945 when the modern world started to end. Robert Oppenheimer invented a hyperobject without knowing it when the atom bomb exploded. This was underscored by his quoting of Shiva, ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.’ In Sydney, Australia, Morton looks at a 2011 work by Aboriginal painter Yukultji Napangati, and he sees it ‘surge toward me, locking onto my optic nerve and holding me in its force field’.12 He was thus captured by the Dreaming, ‘the Aboriginal hyperobject’, finding it ‘impossible to leave the painting. Hairs standing up on my body, tears streaming down my face, slowly I tear myself away.’13 For Morton, the Napangati is a portal onto the ‘Aboriginal hyperobject’ that almost sucks him down into its vortex. This ‘Aboriginal hyperobject’ is just his gloss on the Dreaming, or what they call the bugarrigarra up in Broome. I could summon the most powerful concept-mashing and poetics that I could write in English to give you my gloss on the Dreaming, and never get close. It exceeds description, which is why it is hyper, and why it can’t be destroyed or even trivialised successfully. It is waiting underneath the country. It persists through the county. ‘You people try and dig little bit more deep,’ said Paddy Roe about the country north of Broome. ‘You bin digging only white soil, try and find the black soil inside.’



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And he was deeply concerned about the activities of mining companies who dig without asking: ‘They just went in they own ways,’ he says in another story,14 and didn’t know anything: ‘So they musta knock some stone over – ‘cos some stones, that snake you know [and laughs because he can only speak obliquely about sacred/magic business] – stone – outside you can see it – And Paddy tells a story about an unusual cloud that emerges out to sea over the reef. It tells him something has gone wrong in Looma country, where the oil company is, 200 kms away, so he heads down there to find his countrymen. . . . ‘This is living country!’ is what any Aboriginal person from around Broome will tell you if they are anti-gas or anti-fracking. Reminding me of a character in Reza Negarestani’s cosmo-fiction, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani announced, ‘The Middle East is a sentient entity – it is alive!’ before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as rotting corpse of the sun and the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives. Once oil reaches its destination, the crusading war machines, whose first disposition is to be dynamic, will fuel up and assemble themselves with the oil and its derivatives. As the machines of the western enlightenment consume oil either by burning the blob or fattening up on the blob, the smuggled war machines start to activate and are chemically unbound. The nervous system and the chemistry of war machines smuggled through oil infuse with the western machines feasting on oil unnoticed, as petroleum has already dissolved or refinedly emulsified them in itself, as its chemical elements or its essential derivatives (Islamic ideologies, ambitions, implicit policies, socio-religious entities and formations, etc.).15

Global subterranean oil (as hyperobject) is alive and changing history. It’s out of control, calling the shots, telling the stories, even extending its influence to remote Australia and getting Woodside Petroleum and Buru Energy to go out finding more, on the Dampier peninsula, the Fitzroy River valley or out in the Western Desert. Make sure you call it ‘natural resources’ they are told, as if it comes for free, as if humans are distant from these resources, as if they are not at all complicit, to use Negarestani’s concept. Calling material

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‘natural’ is modernity’s way of idealising matter. It’s all just stuff made of carbon atoms, the same anywhere in the world, so human attachments to it make no sense in this hyper-rationalisation for exploitability. But capitalists are canny, they know exactly which land they want to grab because the free stuff is there; on the other side, Indigenous peoples of the world have sacred things in the country that attaches them exactly to places. But in the middle is a floating population of middle-class greenies with free-floating concepts of Hope, Nature and Beauty, which are of no use or used wrongly, and a free-floating population of fly-in fly-out workers. These are the people of the Holocene, not yet of the Anthropocene. They think they are free agents buoyed by concepts of transcendence. They dream of heavens above and of new planetary homes, should this world run out of resources. They have not yet come down to earth, ‘earthbound’ is what Bruno Latour calls it, people whose awareness comes from the knowledge of losing places, exactly unquantifiable territory, places where they live and belong. With the Anthropocene, the atmosphere has changed, as we try to debate something we can’t fully grasp, yet we fear is changing things forever. The atmosphere of fear is what is held in common – by the so-called left and right wings of politics alike – and it means that we no longer are at all comfortable in that ‘modern world’ so successfully critiqued by Latour, who caught the atmosphere. Postmodernity has returned with a vengeance, this time with an ecological motor driving it. And it is having serious effects in our academic disciplines as their most fundamental base concepts crumble away. What we used to call ‘social reality’ can no longer be taken for granted; ‘nature’ has been shown to be a European invention, set up as a uniform backdrop to the interesting varieties of ‘cultures’ we have been happily studying as variations within the equally dubious – now less centralised – concept of ‘the human’. History can no longer be imagined unfolding on a timeline from the past towards the utopian unknown. Now, there is a serious twist in time. Time is what comes crashing back towards us from the known future, as opposed to the unfolding of past scenarios. So, now the issue is not to have one final attempt to sustain the utopian narrative or assume reliable projections on the basis of past experience, but to best prepare for the most probable eventuality. This is why I think we have to be both speculative and realistic in our recasting of an anti-modernist or amodernist survival story. Picture That Cyclone is supposed to capture the syntax of that story: it is an imperative verb without a subject, whose content is speculation; the demonstrative pronoun ‘that’ is specific, relational and deictic: the object is a hyperobject. Thanks to the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, we have been able to remove the tyranny of subject–object relations from the story and move to (what he calls) the ‘great outdoors’ where real things exist without waiting for human scrutiny to bring them into being, things like cyclones loaded with energy



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flows and endogenous powers.16 ‘There’s a cyclone coming!’ It is anticipated by a shock wave of public feeling, where the public is totally democratised by the threat of being totally flattened. Flat ontology, indeed: the hyperobject creates a new society of swirling trees, animals, building materials and Dorothy’s red shoes. What better place than Australia to move to this great outdoors of speculative realism in order to philosophise all the better! And wonder where we are in this precarious age. I have engaged the problem of predicting and understanding actual cyclones by juxtaposing institutional ways of knowing as process ontologies. Cyclones gather strength as they move through the world (this is what I mean by process ontology). So does meteorological science, striving for reliability with a whole array of radar-picturing technologies, number-crunching stats. and hunches based on prior experience. Well and good, where would we be without radar and stats. and beautiful colourful cross-section pictures of cyclones which try to grasp what this thing that we can’t grasp looks like. And there is another aesthetic that has existed for millennia in Aboriginal Australia, one that seems to do less violence to the country than landscapes, with a diminishing perspective, seen from a masterful point of view. As ‘all day and night the wind [plays] ancestor music’ we anticipate the coming storm. In cyclone season up in Broome, you never know when one will come or how it will start to form off the coast. Cyclones form when the conditions are right, but what causes them? The flap of the wing of that butterfly? * * * And, who will tell this story of preparedness for survival, now that the world of the Industrial Revolution has ended and, with the Anthropocene, we face up to the reality of being earthbound? In Negarestani’s dystopian planetary novel, we found that it was the hyperobject oil that told (is still telling) a powerful story that is as frighteningly real as it is science fiction: ‘Earth as narrated from the nethermost point of view’ is how he summarised that project on the way to completing it. And in Australia, I prefer to listen to, feel, be in attendance upon, the bugarrigarra. I suspect that the bugarrigarra had something to do with saving a powerful site called Walmadany (James Prince Point) in 2013. Bugarrigarra is another hyperobject narrated from a nethermost point of view, or at least immanently in country. Indigenous being-in-country does not have utopian designs of the future, because time is not working like that. Yet somehow – in April 2013 the announcement was made – an alliance of Indigenous peoples and greenies and others managed to resist Woodside Petroleum, made things so uncomfortable for them on Goolarabooloo country, that (for business reasons as well) they packed up and left. A small battle

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won in an ongoing war. The county must have been telling the story that united the people, the bilbies, the dinosaur footprints, a spiritual being called marala, the irrgili trees, the darial birds, black cockies. And if the bugarrigarra was doing the narrating, maybe Woodside Petroleum, Buru Energy, the WA Govt. and the Murdoch press are becoming bit players in the story it has to tell about survival. ‘The country narrates . . .’ is a sentence without an object, an intransitive sentence, because the object is immaterial, contingent, complicit, but earthbound . . . as Alexis Wright reminds us, the snake has something to do with it: This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin.17

But speaking of survival, since I started with an image of an approaching cyclone, I want to get quite practical – none of this airy-fairy conceptual stuff – and tell you what to do to survive. You have to dig into the earth. Build yourselves a mirdibalang cyclone shelter, as instructed by Paddy Roe, big enough for five or six people, with a little fire for warmth and cooking.18 Notes 1. Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (Sydney: Giramondo Publishing, 2006), 458. 2. Bruno Latour, An Enquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 239. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 240. 5. Ibid., 242–43. 6. Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2013), 6. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Wright, Carpentaria, 470. 10. Basil Sansom, ‘Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post-Colonial Australia’, Oceania 72.1 (September 2001): 19. 11. Ibid., 21. 12. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 69. 13. Ibid. 14. Krim Benterrak, Stephen Muecke and Paddy Roe, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, 2nd ed. (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1996), 216–20.



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15. Negarestani Reza, Cyclonopedia (Melbourne: Re-Press, 2010), 71. 16. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 7. 17. Wright, Carpentaria, 2. 18. Benterrak et al., Reading the Country, 112–13.

Index

Aboriginal English, 13 Aboriginal philosophy, 3–4 absolutism, 40 activism, 16; definition, 19; ecosexual, 18–19 Aesthetics, 65, 80–81, 149 affect, xvi, 21, 116, 121, 122 Agamben, Giorgio, 19 allies in social analysis, 21, 52 Allison, Jonathan, 67–68 analogism, 97 animism, 54, 97, 117 Anthropocene, 148 Archeology, 28 Arrernte, 32, 42–43 assemblage, 33, 42, 48, 49, 70, 94, 100, 105, 108 atmosphere in social analysis, 21, 24, 65, 95 barni (lizard), 15 Barthes, Roland, xiv, 68 Baudrillard, Jean, 127 beauty, 22, 47, 80–81 Benjamin, Walter, xiv, 51, 107, 108–9, 129, 136, 139 Bennett, Jane, 118 Bennett, Tony, 55–56, 64

Bergson, Henri, 53 Bible, The, 28, 30 billiard balls, 119 Blainey, Geoffrey, 105 Botany Bay, 97 Boyer, Christine, 134 Brooks, Cleanth, 65 Broome, 13, 17–18 bugarrigarra (Dreaming), 15, 23, 146, 149 Burton, Aaron, 14 Butcher Joe, 37 Byrne, Denis, xii–xiii, 60 Camus, Albert, 93 capitalism, 21, 49, 108, 123 ceremony, 52 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 41 charm, 22, 23 Chekov, Anton, 68 chronotope, 105 Clärchen’s Ballhaus, 137 Clark, William, 104–6 Clifford, Jim, 13 Cockburn, Kirsty, 19 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 129 commodification, 108, 111, 113–22, 116 composition, 49, 54, 55, 59, 65, 69, 113, 117 153

154 Index

Conrad, Joseph, 118 constructivism, 94, 108 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), 120, 122 Cooke, Stuart, 36 correlationism, 61n9, 64, 94 cosmopolitics, 66 counter-spell, 114, 123 country trade, 104 critical proximity, xiv, 24, 27, 73 critique, xii, 55, 95; versus criticism, 45, 59 cultural diplomacy, 87 Cunard, Nancy, 120 Cyclone Tracy, 143–45 Dakic, Danica, 133 Daniels, Dennis, 142–43 decommodification, 113–22 deconstruction, 81 de Heer, Rolf, 37 Deleuze, Gilles, 49 Dening, Greg, xii, 96 Derrida, Jacques, 28 Descola, Philippe, 97, 102n8, 121 description, superficial, 65, 95 Dixon, R. M. W., 42 Djiagween, Cissy, 23 Dreaming, 3, 142, 144, 146 Durham, Jimmie, 125 Durkheim, Emile, 123 Dylan, Bob, 18–19 Eagleton, Terry, 74n18 Eco, Umberto, 127 Economics, 55; reflexive, 116 emancipation, 24, 40 empiricism, 59, 70, 95 employment, Indigenous, 17–18 Enlightenment, 52 epistemology, 71 ergativity, 41, 98 eros, 16

ethnography, 21, 24 ethno-philosophy, 3 experimentalism, 3, 48, 49, 59, 60, 80, 82, 93, 96, 99, 105 expert testimony, 81–82 fear, 20–21, 148 fictional beings, 57, 79, 141, 144 fictocritical writing, 24, 59, 60 Foucault, Michel, 47 Frazer, Sir James, 102n9 Freud, Sigmund, 15 gaps. See in-between, critique of garbina (shield), 20 Gibson, Ross, xiii–xiv global warming, 145–46 Golub, Alex, 23 Goolarabooloo, 13, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 149 Gordon, Douglas, 133 graphocentrism, 27 Grenville, W. W., 109n2 Haraway, Donna, 13, 18 Harman, Graham, 33, 65, 101 Healy, Chris, 93 Heaney, Seamus, 63–73 Highsmith, Patricia, 56–59 Hobsbawn, Eric, 5 Homer, 16–17 Hosty, Kieran, 109n2 Howard, John, 88, 89, 95 humanism, 6, 52, 94 Humanities seminar, practice of, 47, 55 Hunter, Ian, 59 hyperobjects, 145–46, 149 hyperreality, 127 in-between, critique of, 53, 59, 70–71, 73, 100 Indyk, Ivor, 29, 37n3 institutions, 9, 22, 45, 144 intercolonial relations, 105, 107, 109 irreduction, 52, 105, 117

Index

Jabirr Jabirr, 14, 16 James, William, 95, 121 James Price Point. See Walmadany Jones, Gail, 136–37 judgement, 47, 48, 59, 80 Kafka, Frans, xi Kant, Immanuel, 48 Kawaskai W650, 50 Keogh, Ray, 37 Kimberley Land Council, 15 knowledge chains, 82, 100–101 Kobane, xiv landscape painting, xv, 28 Langton, Marcia, 17, 23, 31, 32 language as labour, 27 language learning, 131–32 Lascars, 104, 106 Latour, Bruno, xii, xiv, xv, 4, 21, 28, 33, 41, 45, 47–48, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 63, 64, 70, 72, 77–82, 94, 101, 111, 117, 135–36, 141, 148 Law, John, 121 Lea, Tess, xi Leavis, F. R., 31–32, 74n18 Levi, Primo, 115 life, 59, 66, 69, 74n18, 105, 116 lilyin song, 34–35 Lingis, Alphonse, xii, xvi, 22 Literature, Australian, 28, 29 living country, 14 localism, 3–4 Lommel, Andreas, 36 love, xiv, 21–22 Lurujarri Heritage Trail, 16 magic, 97; contiguous, 98, 99 Mansfield, Katherine, 68–69 Marx, Karl, 114, 118 materialism, 54, 56, 77–82 matters of concern, 94, 103 Mauss, Marcel, 114 McLaverty, Michael, 67–68

155

mediators, 33 Meillassoux, Quentin, 61n9, 148 meso level, 53 message stick technology, 7 Miller, Toby, 63 Mischke, Dennis, xv, xvi modernisation, 16, 23–24, 99 modernism, 4, 73, 99 modernity, 24, 27, 99, 144; amodernity, 41, 49, 148 modes of existence, 51, 52–53, 56, 57, 59, 65, 70, 81 Montaigne, Michel de, 102n8 moral pedagogy, 122 Morris, Meaghan, 80 Morton, Timothy, 65, 145 Mowaljarlai, David, 30–31, 37 Mowanjum, 30 multi-naturalism, 52 multirealism, 49, 51, 55, 56, 65, 73 Nabokov, Vladimir, 124n18 Napangati, Yukultji, 146 nationalist mythology, 93 naturalism, xv, 97 naturecultures, 77 Negarestani, Reza, 147, 149 Newtown, 30 Ngumbal, 33–35 Nugent, Maria, 102n12 Nyigina, 14 object-oriented writing, 53; object-oriented philosophy, 65–66, 85 oil as hyperobject, 147 ontology, plural, xv, 45, 64, 66. See also multirealism oral history, 88 Papunya art tradition, 29–30 parthenogenesis, 63 participation, the right to, 24, 49, 103, 109 partners, 21, 55, 65, 69, 72–73

156 Index

Pearson, Michael, 114–15 Pergamon Museum, 132 Peter the Great, 122 phenomenology, 51 philosophy, Indigenous, 42 poetics, Indigenous, 30, 32; of place, 43; practice of, 63 political ecology, 94–95 politics, 52, 81 postmodernism, 95, 148 Povinelli, Elizabeth A., 25–26n22 provincialisation, 4, 81 Rajchman, John, 49 rayi (children’s spirits), 14–15 Rée, Jonathan, 93 reference, 56, 68, 71, 81 relativism, 40, 95 representation, 70–71, 73, 94, 97–98 reproduction, cultural, 4, 15, 42, 49, 55–56, 63–64, 69–71; biological, 19, 64, 131; reproductive beings, 80–81 Reynolds, Henry, 95–96 Roe, Joseph, 24 Roe, Paddy, 13–16, 20, 32, 33–36, 146–47, 150 Roe, Teresa, 13–14, 16 Rothenberg, Jerome, 27 sacredness, 22 Sakai, Naoki, 32 Sansom, Basil, 142–44 Schließzwangschlüssel (Berlin key), 135–36 Schlunke, Katrina, xii, xvi–xvii, 93, 96, 98, 99 Schreger pattern, 119 scrivelloes, 119 Sellheim, Berndt, 126 Shelton, Allen, 114 simulacra, 127 singing, as sorcery, 7 skin names, 13

slavery, 118 Sloterdijk, Peter, 16, 21–22 Snow, Dash, 133 Sony cassette tape recorder, 33 Souriau, Etienne, 57, 70, 72, 125 spatial lexicography, 3 speculation, 49 speculative cargo, 104–5 speculative realism, 85, 108, 149 spheres in social analysis, 21–22, 24 steamships, and consumption of coal, 114–15 Stengers, Isabelle, 53, 57, 114 Stevens, Tom, 25n22 Stewart, Kathleen, xii storytelling, 135–39 Strehlow, T. G. H., 42–43 Subaltern Studies, 5 Sunset Ethnography, 14 Taussig, Michael, xii, xiv, 53, 73, 81, 82, 115, 125 technocentrism, 27 Ten Commandments, 31 thymos, 16 Time, reversed, 148 tjukurpa (Dreaming), 3 tone, xiv Torres, Pat, 13 totemism, 42, 97 tradition, defn., 30; 31–32, 37; Indigenous, 32 transcendentalism, 69–70, 108, 123, 148 translation, 27, 29, 32–33, 82 Unaipon, David, 60 Velocette MAC350, 54 Vincent, Deborah, 22 vitalism, 49, 53, 105 Walker, John Frederick, 119–20 Walmadany, 19–20, 149 water spirit, 60

Index

Watt, James, 50 Weavers, Nik, 19 Wenders, Wim, 131, 137 Whitehead, A. N., 65, 121 Whybrow, Nicholas, 134, 137 Windschuttle, Keith, 87–89, 91, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 133–34

157

Woodard, Ben, 142 Woodside Energy, 15–16, 18, 21–22, 147, 149–50 words versus language, 51 Wordsworth, William, 67 world versus cosmos, 51 Wright, Alexis, 29, 36–37, 141–42, 150