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8

PAGANS, PERVERTS OR PRIMITIVES?

EXPERIMENTAL JUSTICE IN THE EMPIRE OF CAPITAL

Bill Readings

In characterizing Lyotard’s work as providing ‘a rationale for lying back and enjoying late capitalism’, Alex Callinicos speaks for a number of critical sociologists and Marxist cultural analysts.1

Horrified by the prospect of a paganism that leaves him nothing to believe in and everything yet to be done, Callinicos concludes that the benefit one draws as a reader of Lyotard is the indulgence of perversions; simply that one ‘may now sample the benefits of commodity fetishism without a twinge of guilt’.2 Paganism, it seems, is the old spectre of fin de siècle perversion and decadence. I want to argue that Lyotard’s rethinking of philosophy as a process of experimental or pagan judgement allows the question of justice to be kept alive in late capitalism. Just as paganism is not merely decadent perversion, it is not the return to primitive mysticism that Habermas claims.3 Lyotard’s insistence on the radical heterogeneity of language games provides a series of hints as to the stakes in the complete ‘overhaul’ of ‘the meaning of the world “politician” ’for which he calls in Just Gaming.4

The case requiring the exercise of experimental or pagan judgement that will be examined concerns the relation between Australia (a modern republican nation-state, officially dedicated to the Idea of humanity) and the indigenous people of the Australian continent. A brief excursus, beside marking this essay as resolutely occasional, may allow us to establish the relevance of this marginal case, at the edge of the Western Empire, to the contemporary framework of political dispute.5 The tensions attendant on the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 seem to me to have less to do

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with the social impact of rampant acquisition of consumer durables than with newly emergent nationalisms rejecting the claim of the Soviet government that Marxist doctrine speaks for universal human nature. A series of conflicts over the extent of federalism also marks the politics of the United States, the European Economic Community and India. These struggles do not have any common political agenda, nor do they translate simply into political calculations of progressive and reactionary. Thus, for example, the United States federal government at times protects minority rights against recalcitrant local practices of discrimination in a classic paradigm of Enlightenment, at times suppresses diversity in the name of universal citizenship. The dispute common to these problems is the clash between the metanarrative of a unitary state claiming to embody universal values and more fragmentary or explicitly local communities or minoritarian groups, groups which may seem either reactionary or progressive. The central state imposes a notion of abstract citizenship in the name of a narrative of the progressive realization of national (and ultimately, supra-national or human) destiny, erasing the specificity of local practices.

Such oppositions between the totalizing and the minoritarian raise a problem for the social critic: if justice is an abstract universal, how can it reside with the explicitly local?6 Traditional political discourse suggests that social justice is an abstract model, a set of criteria in terms of which each case can be judged. As Lyotard puts it in Just Gaming:

there is a type of discourse that somehow dominates the social practice of justice and that subordinates it to itself. This type of discourse is common to an entire political tradition (that includes Marx as well), in which it is presupposed that if the denotation of the discourse that describes social justice is correct, that is, if this discourse is true, then the social practice can be just insofar as it respects the distribution implied in the discourse.

(JG p. 20) Tactically, one may at times support the centre against the margins (over civil rights in the U SA) or the margins against the centre (resisting forced sterilization in India). One may criticize the Soviet Union in terms of Marxism, or the USA for failing to live up to the condition of republican democracy. None the less, a model of

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universal justice conventionally grounds our arbitration of these disputes; one defends the minority against the totality only in the name of a higher totality, such as universal human rights. What is common to American liberal republicanism, European social democracy, Indian socialism and Soviet communism is an understanding of the nature of human society in terms of universal abstraction. In this sense, they all share a common ‘modernity’, proposing a metanarrative of emancipation. As Lyotard characterizes the stories in Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Marxism will reveal the proletariat as universal subject of history, democracy will reveal human nature as the people become the subject of a universal history of humanity, the creation of wealth will free mankind from poverty through the technological breakthroughs of free-market capitalism or the redistributive policies of state socialism.7

Lyotard’s paganism consists in refusing to counter the evident repressive force of these metanarratives (the imperialism of modernity) with another, purer metanarrative, a new model. Lyotard’s point is that such a model would itself be an imperializing abstraction, that ‘the question of justice for a society cannot be resolved in terms of models’ (JG p. 25). The claim to legitimate a prescriptive politics by appeal to a literally describable model of universal justice necessarily totalizes one narrative of the state of things and victimizes those excluded from political performativity. Lyotard redescribes justice as the task of responding to what he calls différends, points at which the framework of political representation (what counts as ‘political discourse’) performs a victimization (‘a damage [dommage] accompanied by loss of the means to prove the damage’).8 The aim of this brief survey is to point out that différends occur marginally and occasionally because they are marginal to our ways of thinking about social justice, rather than because they are uncommon. Différends are singular, but they are not rare. If a différend is ‘a case of conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments’ (TD p. xi), the metalanguages of our modernity consistently propose a universal rule of justice or equity that silences any argument structured on other principles, any heterogeneous language game.

The structural implication of such victimization with the category of knowledge itself in the post-Enlightenment west is amply evidenced in the history of anthropolog ical treatment of the Aborigine. Kenelm Burridge’s Encountering Aborigines offers a

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straightforward example of the conceptual imperialism that dogs even the most well-meaning and tolerationist attempt to think about Aboriginal culture within the terms of universal humanity. Using the Australian Aborigine as a test case for the history of anthropology itself, Burridge eschews the imperialist myths of primitivism that animated the first anthropological studies of the Aborigine. His insistence on ‘the reach into otherness’ demands that we must learn from the Aborigines just (or almost) as much as they from us and he explicitly links the epistemological assurance of western modernity (the assurance that makes other cultures merely objects of study and the western man of science into an ‘impersonal’ observer) to the road to Dachau.9 Yet Burridge singularly fails to perceive that his notion of common humanity is itself a product of that very epistemological arrogance that the Enlightenment celebrated, that the notion of a ‘common heritage’ that ‘we and they’ might ‘come in time to share’ is very much our notion.10 In his concluding sentence, Burridge remains an imperialist when he fails to recognize that ‘history’ is an entirely western term, that it still spells extinction for the Aborigine:

as Aboriginal cultures melt into history, Aborigines have to explain themselves not only to themselves but to those others in the differentiated community they are joining.11

As we shall see, it is very little by way of differentiation if Aborigines are only permitted to be different provided that they give evidence before the imperial tribunal of world history. The argument of this essay will be that universal history is not the ground of global community but of victimization and terror, in so far as aboriginal otherness is admitted only with the proviso that the rules of evidence of western rationality and the temporality of western historicism prevail. Thus, in turning to Australian Aborigines in order to illustrate the pagan justice called for in Lyotard’s writings I am not proposing that the Aborigines offer an identity like ours, and thence a model of paganism that we might apply universally. Rather, the différend between Aborigines and the liberal capitalist democracy of the Commonwealth of Australia illustrates the injustice. Justice in this case will not be an abstraction that can reside with one argument or other; the radical incommensurability between the two kinds of arguments means that neither can recognize the other as an ‘argument’ at all. If I am to do justice to this case, a number of caveats are necessary. First of all, within the terms of western

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intellectual rationality, I am not talking about Australian Aborigines at all. I shall be looking at the différend between the Aborigines and the west as it is witnessed in a film, Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream; this is a fiction of indigenous Australia, which I hope to use by analogy to Barthes’s ‘fictional Japan’ in Empire of Signs—as much of Aboriginal life as a westerner can see.12 As such, I can claim no more than to ‘write the history of our own obscurity—manifest the density of our narcissism’.13 That is to say, these are not ‘real‘ Aborigines, an authentic other (another identity) to western culture into which westerners can transplant themselves empathically. Rather than an alternative organic community these Aborigines (who do not belong to either myself or to Werner Herzog) appear to us as pagans, or what Lyotard has elsewhere called ‘the Jews’, an other to western modernity that haunts its margins.14

Paganism does not lie in a celebration of Aboriginal rootedness but in the fact that, whatever it is, the Aborigines’ ‘authenticity’ or ‘identity’ is radically inaccessible to us. Keep the question open, imagine that I make no negative value judgement in saying, as I shall have to later in this paper, that Aborigines are not ‘human’, because by considering them ‘human’ (exemplars of an abstract nature that we share) we victimize them, make them more like us than they are. Their identity remains radically untranslatable, heterogeneous to western modernist rationality.15 And yet it remains. It remains as that otherness which western modernity must annihilate, whether by murder or assimilation, in realizing its own universal dream. It remains in that the very energy required for its extinction bears mute witness to a non-identity, to the imperialist terror inherent in western notions of justice and humanity as universal abstractions. It remains as the encounter that Herzog’s film evokes, an encounter which lacks a language that might phrase it adequately, an encounter in which language encounters silence rather than silence being simply language’s absence (or vice versa).

Herzog’s film centres on the dispute between an Aboriginal group and a mining corporation (Ayers Mining). It takes place at the edge of Empire, in the Australian desert, on a site which is at the same time central to the political struggles currently animating the west: the rights of indigenous peoples in the wake of Empire. In the course of the film a radical aporia in legal arbitration appears as a structural necessity of the modernist insistence on the representability of the human and the possibility of universal justice. In Herzog’s treatment of the Aboriginal in the face of the law, injustice is shown to reside

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not in accidents or errors of the political or legal representation of rights nor in a particular structure of political or legal representation but in the exclusive rule of representation itself. Where the Green Ants Dream shows that ethical responsibility demands a quasi-aesthetic experimentation if justice is to be done to an Aboriginal claim that can only be evoked as irrepresentable. The film, that is, simply does not make sense, if sense is delimited by considerations of representability (Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, in Freud’s term). And it is only by not making sense, by evoking what we may call the ‘strange beauty’ of the Aboriginal, that a sense of the injustice that is being done to the indigene can be preserved.16 Doing justice is a matter of experimentation rather than of correspondence to models. The quasi- aesthetic strateg ies that evoke this aporia in the political representation of justice will be explored in order then to argue for a refiguration of the political, specifically one that rejects the universality of the human as a category. This is something rather more unimaginable than the orthodox post-Althusserian attack on humanism, where ‘subject’ reinscrib es the very categorical universality that is denied to the liberal concept of ‘human nature’.17

Before discussing the film in detail, I want to establish in some specificity the discursive co-ordinates of the modern state, which always aspires to empire by virtue of its claim to embody the universal will of human nature in speaking with a republican ‘we’. Lyotard argues in The Differend that the notion of universal human nature, and the attendant imperialism (external and internal) of the modern nation-state, proceed from the representational structure of the republican ‘we’. Where the Green Ants Dream is set in contemporary Australia, an effectively republican commonwealth. Whatever its de jure relation to the English crown and the historical traditions of British imperialist expansion, Australia has a long history of genocide that parallels treatment of indigenous peoples in the United States. The continued existence of the immig rant Australian Commonwealth after the dissolution of the British Empire means that Australia finds its rationale as a modern state in the Republican tradition, by analogy with France or the United States. As Lyotard points out in The Differend, the idea of the modern democratic republic is that of a people that becomes a people by saying ‘we, the people’, rather than by living together, or living in any one place, for a long time: ‘In a republic, the pronoun of the first-person plural is in effect the linchpin of/for the discourse of authorization.’18 In the notice entitled ‘Declaration of 1789’, Lyotard points out the links

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between the republican ‘we’ and the notion of universal humanity, ‘the Idea of man’.19 As he puts it, ‘After 1789, international wars are also civil wars’.20 Lyotard’s analysis of the republican ‘we’ in The Differend focuses on France, but its contours apply to the modern western democracy, be it Europe, the United States, or Australia.

The claim of universal humanity inherent in the republican ‘we’ underpins the apparent paradox that a nation like the United States, dedicated to the inalienable rights of man, should be hostage to racism, sexism and homophobia, with a long history of genocide waged against Native Americans. American hatred of difference and fear of the other is so persistent and complex precisely because Americans believe themselves to be human. Theirs is not a tolerance of difference, but of identity, of the identity of an abstract human nature. Or, to put it less provocatively, they believe that they can say ‘we’, and that their ‘we’ will stand for humanity, that it can mean ‘we humans’. The Republic declares itself to be the citadel of freedom and religious tolerance freed from monarchical oppression. The United States stands today indicted of enormous crimes of intolerance towards other cultures both internally and externally, from the repression of African-Americans and the nearextermination of the indigenous peoples of central North America through to at least the Vietnam War. How can the citadel of freedom have been built with the stones of oppression and imperialism, cemented with the blood of victims rather than of martyrs? This is no accident. It has to do with the way the Republic says ‘we’, from its inception in the phrase ‘we, the people’. That ‘we’ has the effect of never allowing the question ‘Who are we to speak?’ to arise. The American ‘we’ is inherently integrationist—which is why anyone can become an American, why all Americans (and Australians) are essentially immigrants. This is why fantasies of space travel such as Star Trek are so compelling: the site in which the modern state elaborates the understanding of the human subject as essentially immigrant.21 The Americanness of someone who says ‘we’ is not grounded in anything outside the act of saying ‘we’, which makes America a modern country. A republic is not founded in a common tradition but in a common declaration of independence from tradition, something which the facts of colonialism and immigration underline in the United States and Australia even more than in Lyotard’s France. So republics do not ask where they have come from (no aristocracy of blood) but where they are going. The republic is the nation that is modern because it is going somewhere, that is headed towards a ‘we’

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that will be the ‘we’ of humanity itself. Humanity in its essence, freed from any local constraints of class, race, creed, geographic origin. Universal humanity.

Lyotard notes the paradox of the fact that the republican ‘we’ is self-authorizing in part four of his Notice on the French Declaration of 1789.22 The same logic applies to the American Declaration of Independence. When we say ‘we, the people’ in order to found a state, we presuppose the existence of a people who can say ‘we’, even though it is only the declaration of independence that brings that people into existence as a people capable of saying ‘we’, a people that understands itself as a community. The founding fathers didn’t worry about this logical flaw because they understood this statement as something in the nature of a promise. The American state is dedicated to a proposition that it will be its historical project to bring into being: the proposition of a common humanity, the proposition that there is such a thing as a people out there waiting to come into being. Lyotard’s vigilance reminds us that it is very dangerous to assume that we know humanity in advance, that humanity, or tomorrow, belong to us. We are never so terroristic as when destiny seems manifest.

The project of the republican ‘we’ is to build a consensus that defines its community as that of humanity in its freedom. As Lyotard puts it, the republic asks, ‘What must we do to become ourselves’, to become a freer, more American, more human society?23 Our community is established in the suppression of difference and the revelation of the common humanity that underlies our various cultural and racial ‘clothes’. The achievement of tolerance will be a consensus, the community of a homogeneous ‘we’, in which our association is grounded on our common humanity. But the question we don’t ask, can’t ask, is ‘Who are we to speak?’. We cannot enquire into the ‘we’ that grounds the possibility of our becoming ‘ourselves’.

Lyotard argues that the homogenous ‘we’ is not innocent, but that its union of the ‘I’ and the ‘you‘ is the domination of the sender or speaker and the suppression of the receiver or hearer. Any culture that doesn’t understand itself as a ‘self, or as potentially human, is silenced, suppressed. No one can speak to republics unless they understand themselves as a ‘we’, a people—a different people perhaps, but a people all the same. All the same: a people united by being all the same, being people. As Lyotard reminds us, acts of

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great terror have been committed not simply in the name of but as a result of the presumption of a common, abstract, universal humanity.

Herzog’s film is a minute example of the paradigm of such acts of terror, focusing on a small mining station called Mintabe.24 Hackett, a young white mining engineer, conducts blasting tests for mineral deposits on behalf of the Ayers Mining Company. His tests bring the mining company into conflict with a group of local Aborigines who wish to prevent the blasting or mining lest the ‘dreaming’ of the green ants be disturbed and the ‘universe world’ come to an end. The dispute is taken to the Supreme Court, where the Aborigines lose. An extra-legal settlement by Ayers Mining apparently ‘pacifies’ the Aborigines by giving them a large green ant-like aeroplane (an RA AF Carib ou) in which the tribal elder and an alcoholic Aboriginal ex-pilot fly off east in the direction of the annual migration of the green ants, apparently crashing in the mountains. Disgusted by the conduct of the mining company, the engineer Hackett goes off into the bush to live as a kind of hermit. The film does not explain whether or not the world would have ended had not the mimetic sacrifice been made.25

Where the Green Ants Dream can therefore be viewed as an attempt to negotiate with the terms of Lyotard’s call for a quasi-aesthetic experimentation as the grounds of doing justice: ‘let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name’.26 The film does not represent an other so much as bear witness to an otherness to representation, a différend. The task of witnessing requires, according to Lyotard, a series of paralogical experiments which displace the governing frame of representation. Such experiments are ‘pagan’ in that they seek to do justice rather than represent the truth in their interventions. If the problem of cultural transformation is that of how the weak can be made strong, paganism resists the Marxist piety which claims that the oppressed are really, truly, strong, and that we need merely to strip away the veils of ideological illusion to reveal the proletariat as historical destiny. There is no true strength to the Aborigines that western discourse can represent, yet a tendency to be exterminated is not the mark of some internal flaw. Paganism does not aim to represent the truth of the Aborigines, to show them as truly strong; rather it employs ruses so that their weakness may overcome the strength of their oppressors. I call these ruses, tricks and experiments quasi-aesthetic, following Lyotard’s

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insistence on the paralog ical nature of postmodern aesthetic experimentation (as opposed to modernist aesthetic innovation).27

Don’t represent the Aborigines; testify to their différend with representation as the voicing of an identity. The opening sequence jump cuts between the diagonal slash of a conveyer belt and that of a digeridoo, between the booming of a digeridoo and the grinding of machinery, between the conical pile of the anthill and that of the slag-heap. All of the film is wagered on the possibility that these are not differences within a representational frame but marks of a différend with representation itself.28 Thus, the opening shot of Mintabe exacerbates the visual effect of heat haze to the point where the filmic surface seems to buckle. The titles supervene, extended in the two-dimensional virtual space of ‘textuality’ (as described by Lyotard in Discours, figure) evoking the incommensurability of this landscape of the green anthills with the rational discourse that seeks to map and name it. This incommensurability is that of the différend between the modern republic, founded on the Idea of man, and the Aborig ines. From the strange relation of the Ab origines to electromagnets to the final sacrifice, the film consistently hints that the Aborigines are in some sense closer to the ants than to the white men. In making this comparison I do not mean that ants are or should be in any way anthropomorphized, or that Aborigines are animals. Rather, the western inability to consider Aborigines except as animals or plants marks the obscurity of our pretended ‘enlightenment’ and the limited ‘universality’ of the western concept of the ‘human’.29

The array of white characters in the film embodies a multiplicity of destinies for modernity. Ferguson, the executive vice-president of the Ayers Mining Company makes the claim of universalism, that ‘what we take out of the ground was meant for everyone’. The liberal capitalist claim for emancipation by means of the creation of wealth is backed by a negotiating strategy in which communication and domination are inextricably linked. Ferguson immediately demands ‘Who is your spokesman?’, insisting that the Aborigines isolate an individual speaking subject authorized to produce a republican ‘we’ analogous to that of the white man. When the Aborigines reply by indicating that they have a group of ‘tribal elders’ and ‘a giver of song’ rather than a single voice, he reminds them that:

Until today we’ve lacked a contact, or at least one official

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person to address…All of us, including you, are subject to the binding strictures of the Land Rights Act of the Commonwealth of Australia.

This rigid insistence of the universality of the law of the white man, in this case the law that claims to take note of Aboriginal rights, is mocked when Ferguson plaintively demands that the Aborigines produce someone authorized to sign for receipt of the aeroplane. The Aborigines ignore him, just as they refuse the company’s offers. The litany of negotiation, in which Ferguson progressively raises the stakes, charts the history of exploitation and assimilation of the indigenous people. First, in return for the right to mine, the company offers technological toys: a pumping station and a school bus. Then Ferguson switches to the strategy of assimilation rather than robbery: a small percentage of profits. His final offer underlines the link between representation and death for the Aborigines: funding for an Aboriginal art museum. Kenelm Burridge’s ‘melting into history’ of the Aborigine appears clearly as an oppressive move, offering the Aborigines the chance to turn their culture into an object of western historical representation and a commodity for exchange among white men.30

Hackett, the young geologist, figures the heroic phase of modern capitalist man, the youthful explorer who conducts tests despite the initial opposition of the; hidebound traditionalists of the mining corporation. His general liberalism links the emancipatory or even rebellious spirit of modernity to imperialist expansion. His main companion on the site is a supervisor called Cole, who calls Aborigines ‘black bastards’ and makes Nazi jokes referring to Hackett as ‘mein Kapitän’ or ‘mein Kommandant’. The liberal and the thuggish faces of modernity are accompanied by an old lady, named Miss Stralow (Australia?), who exhibits a naïve faith in modern technology’s capacity to find her dog, Benjamin Franklin, lost in the mine workings. Technolog ical invention proves inadequate, and poor Benjamin Franklin remains ‘out in the tunnel, in the darkness’, helpless despite the ingenuity of his namesake’s epigones.31

In contrast, the Aborigines remain largely silent and impassive. Most of their statements in the first part of the film are made in their tribal language and then translated into English. As if to underline the issue of translation, those who at times act as translators in turn require their own statements to be translated by others. Like the

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green ants, which possess a susceptibility to magnetic fields and always align themselves on a north-south axis, the Aborigines seem to possess a peculiar relation to electronics, repeatedly causing elevators and digital watches to malfunction. As is later pointed out in court, their relation to time and number is entirely alien to the abstract enumeration that characterizes western rationality, evidenced in the following dialogue:

Hackett: How long have you been waiting? Daipu: A little long while. Hackett: Ten minutes? Daipu: Yes. Hackett: One hour? Daipu: Yes. Hackett: Since yesterday evening sundown? Daipu: Yes.

The truth of each response marks a stoic refusal to conceive of time in chronological terms. Each question is answered in response to the immediate situation in which it is posed, rather than according to any commonly held metalanguage of universal temporality.32 This is paralleled by a relation to space which is not that of the western cartog raphic tradition, which is not org anized by abstract dimensional co-ordinates. Thus the land exists as an apparently random series of sacred sites or dreamings, which mark pathways in an ahistorical temporality.33 Importantly, however, the film does not mark this alterity as a mystical identity but insists upon its otherness. Thus, the Aboriginal critique of western man appears entirely incongruous in its failure to evoke the organic rootedness that is the usual object of western nostalgia:

You white men are lost. You don’t understand the land. Too many silly questions. You have no sense, no purpose, no direction.

The différend, the heterogeneity of Aboriginal to western argument, appears here in the very congruity of this statement with the western criticism of the Aborigines (who at one point steal transmission fluid in order to get high by drinking it). Each side speaks a different language, and the film refuses to identify the Aborigines as simply the inchoate or primitive opposite of the rationality of technological man. They are not an opposite, an other that the west might represent, they are different, irrepresentable.

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This différend appears most clearly in the representation of the Supreme Court hearing in Where the Green Ants Dream, on which I want to focus. The plaintiff and the defendant do not merely speak different languages, they participate in utterly incommensurable language games. As Lyotard’s analysis of Auschwitz in The Differend establishes, the assumption of common humanity and the goal of tolerant consensus, which has universal human understanding as its horizon, grounds the claim of western liberal democracies that all difference can be overcome and that we can understand each other. Thus, if we are truly human, truly tolerant, then everyone may speak and no one will be silenced. Each community may speak a different language but all languages can be translated into each other so that understanding may be reached. The goal of republican tolerance, the tolerance of identity, is to find the universal language, the ‘common law’ of humanity that will arbitrate all disputes in reference to what is human, to what constitutes human liberation. The variant idioms of plaintiff and defendant will then be translated into this common language, this common law, so that a justice may be done which respects human freedom. Differences arising from cultural diversity are referred to the universal language of human liberty and freedom so that difference may be overcome.

In this case, the judge is a kindly old man who professes himself sympathetic to the Aborigines, and Herzog makes it clear that he is not biased in favour of the mining company. The injustice done to the Aborigines is not the effect of a biased white man’s law. Rather, injustice is the effect of the very fairness of the white man’s law, its blank, bleached, abstract humanity—its claim to be ‘common law’. Common—both traditional and universally reasonable. That is to say, the silencing of the Aboriginal voices is not the product of an external censorship, a repression that we might denounce as unfair. The Aborigines are killed with kindness, by the assumption that they are the same kind of people as the white Australians; they are silenced by the very fact of being let speak.

The question of silencing structures the entire court hearing, as Aborigines are silenced in the very act of being ushered into court to speak. The scene begins with an usher, who calls out for ‘silence’, so that ‘all persons...shall be heard’. The possibility of being heard depends on a dismissal of noise, of a certain multiplicity of voices that characterizes Aboriginal tribal discussions. There is only one kind of voice, the ‘we’ of abstract human nature discovering itself. And the Aborigines do not speak with that unitary ‘we’; their

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resolutely ungrammatical ‘we’ marks the inception of a multiple patchwork of stories, what Lyotard would call ‘little narratives’: ‘We’re going to tell you about the land. The land that we is living on.’

During the court hearing, the Aborigines produce as ‘evidence’ certain sacred objects. But the sacred objects that will show and prove ‘what the land is belong and belong to the land is’ can only be recorded as an utter blank: ‘wooden object, carved, with marking, the markings indecipherable. The significance of the markings not plain to this court’. Unlike the flag that Governor Phillips erected in 1788 to lay claim to the land at about the same time as the burial of the sacred objects, these markings are untranslatable into any language. They are inhuman, it seems. And their untranslatability is a structural principle: the court must be cleared lest they be seen and the world die (we never see them in the film).

It could be argued, however, that the Aboriginal markings could be translated if only we learnt the language. The heterogeneity of the aboriginal language game is underlined by the appearance of a witness known as ‘the mute’, Mr Balai-La. Balai-La speaks out of turn, and the judge is bemused because Balai-La was introduced to the court as a mute. He is ‘mute’ because he is the only one left alive who speaks ‘his’ language.34 He doesn’t speak any other languages, even if it were not a sin for him to teach the secrets of his tribe’s language to a foreigner. He is mute because there is no one left on earth who can understand what he says. And yet we realize that he does speak a language, but one which we will never be able to understand.35 The mute is the strong figure for the condition of all Aboriginal discourse in the court: the ability to speak is merely a sham. Just because you have a voice doesn’t mean you’re not mute.

In this dispute ‘between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments’, whose claim is just?36 Governor Phillips raised his flag in 1788, around 200 years ago, more or less when the Aboriginal sacred objects were buried. But they weren’t buried at the same time, since they weren’t buried in the same history. The problem is not just that there are two different histories, one of ‘discovery’ and one of ‘invasion’, but that the flag is raised in western historical time and the objects are buried in a time that is not historical in any sense we might recognize. We are dealing with ‘unthinkably ancient times’ as an anthropologist witness puts it: time which cannot be thought by western science.37 This is not so much because it is so old as because

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its cumulation is not organized by counting but by a kind of remaining, as evidenced in the conversation quoted above, so that even to try to write an Aboriginal counter-history would be a kind of imperialism. This radical heterogeneity of languages is replayed not simply in time, but in space as well.

Thus the Solicitor-General, appearing for the mining company, mocks the Aboriginal testimony that delineates territorial space by means of a gesture, or the phrase ‘a little long way’, asking sarcastically ‘Can you please translate that into English?’. The judge’s reprimand of this discourtesy does nothing to alter the discounting of the radical heterogeneity of this language game to that of rational evidence. These are not just two different concepts of the ‘same’ space but understandings of space that are in one case conceptual and in the other not even linked to conceptual abstractions. As the other anthropologist, the white man who dwells beside the Aborigines, points out: there is no abstract enumeration in Aboriginal culture, only the sequence of numbers from one to three followed by ‘many’. Yet, he adds, this is not merely incoherent, since a cattleman will know at a glance if one cow is missing from a corral of six hundred or more.

It might seem therefore that Aboriginal evidence is funny. It’s not obviously evidence. But common law is flexible: as the judge points out, enough hearsay may ‘condense into a palpable truth’. After all, we are all human, and the dignity and eloquence of the judge is exemplary. But what is condensation, here, if not a form of ‘abstraction’, as Marx analyses it, the point at which sheer quantity is translated into quality, when material becomes commodity, when materials become exchangeable, when they speak the common language of money?38 This is the structure of evidence in the white man’s law, even when it doesn’t conform to formal rules. Thus the judge’s tolerance extends to admitting that the rough weight of speech acts, ‘hearsay’, may achieve a mysterious transformation into the supposedly ‘universal’ language of evidence ‘palpable truth’,39 but only by becoming universally exchangeable, palpable; the tolerance that admits Aboriginal evidence, that lets it speak in court, silences the Aboriginal in its translation. In gaining value as evidence, the Aboriginal voice is abstracted from its locality just as the mining company gives land value in abstracting minerals from their location. In order to become evidence, Aboriginal language must be ‘mined’. And of course the voice of the Aborigines is an attempt to speak the land in a way that resists any such mining. As the giver of song

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introduces the Aboriginal case to the court, ‘We’re going to tell you about the land…the land that we’re living on’. The sacred land, where green ants dwell. The green ants cannot emigrate. If the land is not there for them to return to in season, then they cannot return and the world will be destroyed. And the Aborigines ‘belong the land’ in the same way. Not belong to the land: there is no possibility of even a thought of separation or abstraction. They can’t be transplanted, immigrate elsewhere. They have no abstract human nature that would survive in another place, anywhere else.

How then can this case be resolved? What ‘we’ can judge it? Each claimant is right in their own terms, and the application of a notion of universal justice, the appeal to an abstract human nature as the ground of a solution, is unjust to the Aborigines, victimizes them. The Aborigines ‘belong’ (to) a land which cannot be abstracted, transferred, translated (trans-latio, lift across, move, transfer); it is not a land on which humans live, which they exploit, but a land to which humans and non-humans belong in ways that cannot be mapped conceptually. To put it another way, Aborigines are not candidates for the next casting call on Star Trek. Abstraction from the land into a virtual space organized by rational co-ordinates (mapped land, legal property), produces death.40 How can one (a knowing subject) begin to translate, to transpose and take away into another place, the chiasmatic interpenetration of the Aboriginal task of witnessing to ‘What the land is belong, and belong to the land is’? It is a land that cannot be ‘mined’ for its truth, that is destroyed in being made ‘evidence’.

Thus, the injustice that arises is not that of a simple collusion between the language of the mining company and that of the court. The mining company might as well be French, or American, or multinational. Translation would be possible, in principle, between these languages. Injustice in the proceedings of translation comes not from the fact of simply speaking a different language but from the fact that the language of the Aborigines is untranslatable into the language of the court, heterogeneous to the language of common law, of common humanity. An encounter takes place, it happens, but no language is available to phrase it, for the Aboriginal language is insistently local, rooted in the land from which it comes; it cannot become multinational. It cannot, that is, become modern: no one can immigrate into Aboriginal culture. Hence the white man who dwells beside the Aborigines repeatedly remarks that he knows nothing of their culture, insisting that the mining company should go away

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rather than assimilating to the Ab orig ines. The vag rant anthropologist who lives at the edge of the bush (or pagus), like Hackett who goes to dwell beside him, becomes pagan; he does not become an Aboriginal tribesman.41

The Aborigines retain their difference. The pagan tolerance of difference does not mean an identification with the other but an endurance of that unb earable difference without trying to appropriate it. The suggestion that all cultures are fundamentally the same is the trade mark of the imperialism of modernity, which seeks to erase rootedness and difference, to reduce everyone to a blank abstract humanity, a bleached-out indifference. To put it bluntly, saying that we are all just human is an act of imperialism, because it means we are all white under the skin. The last freedom, the power of the enslaved, lies in the refusal to relinquish the experience of difference to the cultural tourism of the oppressor.42

Hence Lyotard’s paganism is not a politics of despair, though it may reject the confidence of political piety that has traditionally animated Marxism. If this is a loss of confidence, the confidence is that of the imperialist. Rather than a relinquishment of political agency, it is a chance to think liberation otherwise than as an abstraction into ever more splendid (more universal) isolation, a refusal to think freedom as self-domination. Lyotard calls for a rethinking of the notion of community under a horizon of dissensus rather than of consensus, a dissensus distinct from atomistic individualism.43 The horizon of consensus is the production of a total subject who will serve as the end of narrative, whether ‘man’ (humanism) or ‘the proletariat as subject of history’ (Marxism). It aims at the revelation of a total ‘we’. To ask, as I have done, ‘Who are we to speak?’ is not to entrench that ‘we’ more firmly but to displace it. To say that we speak radically heterogeneous language games (even to ‘ourselves’) is not a recipe for isolation or solipsism— but a thought of our interaction otherwise than in terms of consensus, unity and self-domination.

What this film portrays is not an incidental act of injustice, a casual imperialism, but the necessary, structurally implicit terror that accompanies the encounter of a people that says ‘we’ with a community that is not modern, that doesn’t think itself as a people. Australia is a republic, however much the Crown is mentioned, and the Aborigines are up against ‘common law’, not an artificial set of rules, a code, but a law that bases itself in the understanding of a ‘reasonable man’, in a common humanity. The paradox that arises is

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that neither side is wrong. There is simply no common humanity between the two sides. Rather, it is unjust to the cultural diversity of the Aborigines to presume that they are human, that the law can understand them. It is unjust to think that they are human. What if thinking diversity lay not in affirming a common humanity, but in actually thinking difference, rather than oscillating between the poles of identity and non-existence? This would mean that doing justice to the difference of the Aborigines lay in westerners recognizing the possibility that their ‘we’ had nothing in common with them, that differences cannot be overcome either by our uniting with them in common humanity or exterminating them.

Thinking this multiplicity and difference is not a matter of finetuning the intersections of race, class and gender in order to liberate a new ‘we’ but a matter of rethinking what struggle and liberation may have to come to be in the light of the radicality of cultural difference. The acknowledgement of the opposition of the ‘we’ to cultural diversity means that politics, the play of dispute and difference, doesn’t end—there is no universal community, no city on a hill. Or as Lyotard puts it in Just Gaming, ‘there is no just society’.44 It is very hard to think this, since most politicians simply want to put an end to politics, to argument, to dispute. Lyotard’s acknowledgement that politics is everywhere, that ‘everything is political if politics is the possibility of the différend on the occasion of the slightest linkage [of phrases]’ means that politics is not about getting it right.45

‘We’ have no way of saying who is right here, the mining company or the Aborigines. No ‘we’ can pronounce once and for all on their dispute. All we can do, and it is a very difficult task, is to try to tell another story, after these two, one that doesn’t seek to synthesize or assimilate them but to keep dispute and the difference an open question, that avoids the injustice of victimization, that doesn’t speak with a ‘we’. This does not mean resolving the dispute within the terms of western rationality but preventing its suppression, keeping difference in question. It is the difficult task of opening western language to silence (which is not the same thing as giving voices to the silent); it is to recognize that this encounter with the mute voice of the Aboriginal happens, although no translation is possible, although it cannot be spoken in any obvious sense, since language would only kill the silence in speaking (of ) it. As Lyotard says, ‘Let us…activate the differences’.46 The struggle must go on, in order that the différend of the Aboriginal cannot be erased by the

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pretensions to abstract universality of the white man’s discourse. This involves a guerrilla struggle to prevent totalizing abstraction, which is also a struggle in this case to prevent mining. Of course this is not because the Aboriginal land claim is more true in any simple sense. One can’t clear up the question of who owns the land, since the Aboriginal way would be silenced even granting them ownership in ‘our’ terms (prepositional ‘property’). Here, then, is Lyotard’s paganism. It is not that ‘we’ have to learn to live with cultural difference; rather, an attention to difference, a living in diversity, explodes the indifferent domination exercised by the consensual ‘we’. It is important to understand that in making this claim I am not simply providing a recipe for giving up the power and pleasure of the dominating ‘we’. I am not romanticizing Aboriginal culture, or saying with Burridge that ‘we have much to learn from them’. ‘We’, in so far as we think ourselves as ‘we’, cannot learn anything—for to learn in that way would be to perform one more act of cultural ‘mining’. Rather, the force of their silent accusation is to make us ask ‘Who are we to speak?’, to give up the unquestioned assumption of our common humanity and to force us to think community and freedom otherwise. Ceasing to think community in terms of a universal ‘we’ gives us the chance to relinquish our enslavement to our own power, to transform a culture in which we only feel ourselves to be ‘men’ in so far as we silence what we cannot understand, bell hooks has pointed out that feminism is not a threat to African-American masculinity, but perhaps the only hope of young black men in an American culture that leads them to murder each other in pursuit of manhood.47 Likewise, to struggle against ourselves, to attempt to think the multiplicity and diversity of culture without recourse to totalitarian notions of the universal, may be the best hope for avoiding total destruction in a world where the dream of consensus stands revealed as the nightmare of mutual annihilation.

The injustice perpetrated on indigenes is not a racism accidental to modernism which might be prevented by including them within a wider concept of human nature. Rather, the assumption of universal human nature, like all modernist metanarratives, lights the way to terror even as it upholds the torch of human rights. The problem of averting genocide demands a respect for difference, a deconstructive ethics, that is prepared to relinquish the concept of the human, to separate liberty from fraternity. Deconstruction rephrases the political, not by adding race along with gender and class to the

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categories by which we calculate oppression but by invoking an incalculable difference, an unrepresentable other, in the face of which any claim to community must be staked.

NOTES

1 Alex Callinicos, ‘Reactionary postmodernism?’, in Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi (eds), Postmodernism and Society, New York, St Martin’s Press 1990, p. 114.

2 ibid. 3 Habermas finds poststructuralism to be ‘neoconservative’ because it

wavers between a decadent postmodernity or a primitivist ‘return to some form of premodernity’ (‘Modernity: an incomplete project’, in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle, Bay Press 1983, p. 8).

4 Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press 1985, p. 55.

5 My usage of the term ‘western’ is cultural rather than geographical throughout—referring to the rule of European modernism.

6 The Eritreans are a good example of this problem for the Marxist critic. When opposing Haile Selassie, the Eritreans were freedom fighters, upholding the torch of liberty against capitalist monarchy. However, once the Marxist Mengistu regime was established in Ethiopia, the Eritreans became forces of ignorance and superstition, preserving oppressive tribal values against universal human freedom as incarnated in the communist government of Ethiopia. This volte- face is not simply the hypocrisy of realpolitik, it is the perfectly logical outcome of the privileging of a universal abstract model of justice. See also Kurdistan.

7 J.-F.Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Paris, Galilée 1986, pp. 53–5.

8 J.-F.Lyotard, The Différend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G.van den Abbeele, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1988, p. 5.

9 Kenelm Burridge, Encountering Aborigines, New York, Pergamon Press 1973, pp. 6, 42.

10 ibid., p. 84. 11 ibid., p. 243. 12 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill

& Wang 1979. As Barthes puts it (p. 3:)

Hence Orient and Occident cannot be taken here as ‘realities’ to be compared and contrasted historically, philosophically, culturally, politically. I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation— whose invented interplay—allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of an unheard of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own. What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient, are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another

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wisdom (though the latter might appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a difference...

I share Barthes’s reserve as to epistemic authority, if not the infelicitous implication that the possibility of difference can be a ‘matter of indifference’.

13 ibid., p. 4. 14 See Heidegger and ‘the jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts,

intro. David Carroll, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1990. Carroll’s introduction offers a helpful statement, as much of a generalization as is possible this side of totalization, of the kind of dispersal and heterogeneity that this lower-case plural word names:

For Lyotard, justice demands that ‘the people’ be thought in terms of ‘the jews,’ that is, in perpetual exodus, both from themselves and from the Law to which they attempt to respond but to which they can never adequately respond. The community of ‘the jews’ is without a project for its unification (either in terms of a mythical origin or end). ‘The jews’ are an ‘unfashioned,’ ‘unworked’ community, a community without a single foundation or identity, a profoundly heterogeneous linkage of the nonidentical.

(Htj p. xxxiii)

Herzog’s German origins, and his long interest in the question of empire (Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo) are not coincidental to this analogy; however, we should remember Lyotard’s caveat:

I use quotation marks to avoid confusing these ‘jews’ with real Jews. What is most real about real Jews is that Europe, in any case, does not know what to do with them: Christians demand their conversion; monarchs expel them; republics assimilate them; Nazis exterminate them. ‘The jews’ are the object of a dismissal with which Jews, in particular, are afflicted in reality.

(Htj p. 3)

15 I risk the pleonasm of ‘radically untranslatable’ in order to mark the extent to which this is not merely a horizontal difficulty incidental to the translation b etween languages but also a kind of vertical impossibility of translation analogous to that which governs the (non-) relation between consciousness and the Freudian Unconscious. On the vertical impossibility of translation, see J.Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London, Athlone Press 1987, pp. 210–11.

16 I draw the term ‘strange beauty’ from the lexicon of particle physics. 17 Thus Reading Capital replaces the ‘young Marx’s’ humanist contrast of

the free producer within a unified community to the alienated subject of capitalism with a distinction between the subject hailed to illusory individuality by ideology and the proletariat as universal subject of history. L.Althusser and E.Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London, New Left Books 1970.

18 Lyotard (1988), op. cit., p. 98.

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19 ibid., p. 145. 20 ibid., p. 146. 21 Star Trek: The Next Generation proves that even Klingons can immigrate

(become human), as long as space still provides a trackless waste within which mankind may wander and which it may dominate.

22 Lyotard (1988), op. cit., p. 146. 23 ibid., pp. 147–8. 24 Since the film script is currently unavailable and the videocassette

version of the film in the United States does not list the dramatis personae on the credits, all my spellings of proper names are approximations.

25 A similar effect, whereby what looks like myth turns out to be at least as ‘real’ as narrative, occurs at the conclusion of Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977).

26 J.-F.Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B.Massumi, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press 1984, p. 82.

27 For a detailed discussion of postmodern experimentation, see chapter 2 of my Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, London, Routledge 1991.

28 It is worth noting the demand of paralogical experimentation in order to testify to the irrepresentable is a far cry from the more programmatic demands that Lyotard makes in ‘Acinema’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin, Oxford, Blackwell 1989. There he lays down a set of rules, a model for the destruction of the representational model. As such, ‘Acinema’ remains a modernist critique of film rather than a postmodern experiment; indeed, in many respects Where the Green Ants Dream fails to conform to its requirement of pure seriality of sterile moments of singular jouissance, whilst remaining a singular film.

29 Something of the force of this différend might be witnessed by pointing out that in speaking of Aborigines within the terms of western rationality, one turns for example to the language of plants in attempting to indicate their habitat-specific existence.

30 This risk establishes just what the stakes are in my present attempt to write about the Aborigines. The celebration of Aboriginal identity as offering a model of paganism for us would be entirely complicit with this move by the mining company.

31 Herzog gives short shrift to Christianity’s claim to be the conscience of capitalist expansion. After an encounter with the deep mystery of the Aboriginal relation to the land, which leads a group to sit in a supermarket on the site where a tree once stood, in order to ‘dream’ their children, Hackett visits a mission station. There an enthusiastic priest teaches Aborigines to sing Christian songs saying ‘I am happy’ in English and Ab orig inal language. The ludicrous quality of Christianity’s claim to be a universal faith is nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the minister’s sweaty enthusiasm and the silent dignity of the Aboriginal ‘giver of song’. The minister asks ‘Can I help you?’; Hackett simply replies ‘No, not really’ and walks away.

32 This kind of discursive fragmentation is an example of the constellation of ‘little narratives’ by which Lyotard characterizes b oth the postmodern condition and pagan justice.

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33 Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines Harmondsworth, Penguin 1987, offers a fascinating account of as much of the patchwork of ‘dreamings’ with which a westerner might come to terms.

34 I place ‘his’ in quotation marks in order make clear that this instance does not fall foul of Wittgenstein’s argument against private languages; it is the language of the victim, not the individual will. Balai-La’s words have always already been spoken elsewhere, in a time and place lost to representation. Balai-La thus corresponds to the opening question that The Différend poses to referential discourse, alluding to Auschwitz:

1 You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it. Most of them disappeared then, and the survivors rarely speak about it.

(p. 3)

35 Nor is this case simply external to us, taking place beyond the margins of our culture, in the nether or outer, savage or primitive world. Freud named this the problem of the Unconscious: a force radically alien to consciousness and yet linked to it, which western rational discourse must seek unsuccessfully to excise.

36 Lyotard (1988), op. cit., p. xi. 37 The court hears from two anthropologists. The expert anthropologist

produces a structural description of ‘mata/mala’ exogamic traditions. Another man, who lives in a shack in the bush, informs the court of the impossibility of understanding the Aborigines in western terms.

38 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York, Vintage Books 1977, vol. 1, book 1, chapters 1–3.

39 The judge refers to legal precedents in Africa and North America where ‘Evidence relating to tribal customs and practices, though founded in hearsay, was given in such overwhelming numbers and with such consistency by the tribal witnesses, as to condense into a palpable truth.’

40 Death in a very real sense. Extermination of Aborigines continues today by the apparently ‘neutral’ act of gaoling them. Aborigines die in gaol not solely because of occasional brutality but because they are marked as individual subjects of the Australian commonwealth, ‘free and equal’ before the law, abstracted from the land into the virtual space of the legal system.

41 This vagrant anthropologist is thus a kind of ‘métèque’, the peripatetic foreign teacher with whom Lyotard identifies in Instructions païennes, Paris, Galilée 1977, and Pacific Wall, trans. Brian Boone, Venice, Los Angeles, Lapis Press 1990. Lyotard explains the distinction between pagan and primitive in Just Gaming:

And then there is a third ordering that is popular, properly pagan, ‘peasant’ in the sense of pagan (and not the reverse): the people of the pagus (who are not the people of the village), who do any telling only inasmuch as it has been told, and under the form of ethnology, of folklore, with the idea that it is a primitive state of discourse from which we have managed

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to get out by means of some well-known operations, basically Platonic ones—I am thinking here of the (unsuccessful) repression of poets and myths attempted in the Republic.

(p. 38)

The pagan is ‘peasant’ in the sense that s/he is denigrated with all the force of the word as an insult in French. Yet s/he is not ‘peasant’ in the sense that s/he dwells in an organic or rooted community, a ‘village’.

42 By analogy, the feminism that really frightens men is not simply the feminism that provides a coherent and exhaustive political platform of articulated demands. It is the feminism that makes its demands felt without ever giving in to the plea of the anxious patriarchy that Freud articulated so strongly, ‘What do women want?’. The partriarchy wants to know that answer in order to (i) do away with the woman question once and for all by giving them what they want—which can’t be everything; (ii) overcome feminism by forcing female desire to articulate by analogy with the end-directedness of male desire—which is another way of saying, show that women were men, all along, under the skin.

43 Lyotard (1984), op. cit., p. 81. 44 Lyotard (1985), op. cit., p. 25. 45 Lyotard (1988), op. cit., p. 139. 46 Lyotard (1984), op. cit., p. 82. 47 bell hooks, ‘Representations: Feminism and black masculinity’, in

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Toronto, Between the Lines Press 1990.