Let’s play a game; yes, piggy-in-the-middle’: notes towards a performance, and Towards an Anthropology of Horror in Interventions – experiments between art and ethnography, Macquarie University, Sydney, (December 2009)

Grief will descend like a wave. Grief will descend like a great pall of dust. Grief will skitter across the bare terrain like a piece of blown cardboard.

Now tell me, what is your excuse, what is your strategy of self-exoneration? Come come, you’re out, you’re off scot-free, while others are in it up to their eyeballs, immersed. Ah yes, the whole body treatment, baptism of fire. So how come these others are in free escape mode? And yes, know it all. There is one problem, you will notice, and it is never them.

In the land of the great white scream …

1

The missionary stands in the middle of an empty stage. Yes, the stage is empty. Low and empty, without adornment of any kind or distraction. He looks from side to side, appears to see nothing, drifts away.
The missionary stands in the middle of the stage. The stage is low and empty. She wears a cotton print dress. A voice whispers ‘Pretty flowers, pretty flowers’.

2

Is there a single image that can tell us how it is, that can ‘strip the cataracts from our eyes’? (FN1) They see only the mayhem where we see life, sordidness where we encounter grace and caring, brutality where we meet the full delicacy of human concern. They only see what they see for the encounter is beyond them, an impossible Everest of the soul. ‘Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, right down Santa Claus lane’, bringing all the good little boys and girls their Christmas gifts neatly encased in niceness and viscose wrapping and cheery goodwill, as if each day brings a new salvation, a new dawn, a new promise, a new distraction. ‘Give us each day our daily deliverance.’
Toys litter the sand. ‘Look,’ says the mother to her pal, ‘all the toys will be smashed by lunchtime. They’re vicious little beasts really, it’s a miracle anything endures. Jealous business, got to smash or grab, possess or destroy. They wheel out the super-new, super- wide white screen, all reality brought instant to the living room. The people depart, drift off. One old lady carries a blackened billycan as if in memory of former times or out of sheerest habit. She veers slightly as she walks. The dress hangs straight down. It might have been a petticoat once, in some earlier incarnation. Maybe it was white once. Maybe it was always black.

3

Is there a word, an expression, something that can reach to the heart of the matter? Massacre? Too remote, too impersonal. Genocide? No, not people, societies, whole ways of being, whole swathes of them reduced to nothing, torn from their histories, scattered like handkerchiefs on the equally abandoned terrain, over-run, disregarded, treated with disdain. Indifference? There is that, a casual superiority that assigns the future to everyone and all peoples except themselves. For they are exempt. History is on their side for somehow God will look after them. History will not strike them for they are outside it. Strange paradox. ‘She’ll be right,’ they say, ‘we’ll figure something out. After all we’ve survived so far.’ Ah, the triumphalism of those who have survived. Survived only without any sense of the cost, terrifying themselves at spectres of their own making, believing naively, that science is science, that there is truth somewhere, justice even, and not merely in what comes to pass unless of course you can construct yourself as somehow the beneficiary of things. Let us not praise the ancestors for they may betray us at any moment. What they bequeathed they bequeathed and it may seem something. That’s when a society still has a history and the whiff of agency is in the air, even if it is tentative and lacking in precise shape. But remove agency and you remove purpose, remove the capacity to act in the broader scheme of things and you will be in-directed into your own body, left with that as the last playground. You too can become a spectacle, isn’t that nice! When the sense of indebtedness becomes too great, when the self no longer feels that it can participate in the production of things in the making of its own world for itself, then deny the past entirely, cast the debt from ourselves, make ourselves ‘the one-and-only,’ the one and only thing, just half a step away from becoming just another toy thrown on the sand, squandered; and demeaned by the gift that comes for no reason, merely pro forma, a matter of form, a matter of entitlement which is in fact no entitlement, an administered gift that puts all the burden on the recipient — a burden which at the end of the day we should not be surprised to find refused. ‘We demand, you give, we refuse.’ For somehow in this suddenly, in the most shadowy but also most imperious fashion, there comes the quick fleeting understanding that the giver does not care, that the giver does not intend to care, it is merely what you do, what is done, so many houses this calendar year and no expectation, no expectation but the worst expectation, that soon it will be wreckage all around  — and the cycle of demand made – demand acceded to –gift finally dismissed or renounced endlessly put in play. ‘In any case’, say the most cynical of the bureaucrats and the most cynical of the politicians, ‘it’s the flow-on effects...’ It’s all ‘stimulation’ and ‘flow’ and the appearance of delivery...’ This is what we did’, they can say but in reality they don’t know what they’re doing for there is no understanding, none at all, of consequences. At each stage there is an adjustment movement: ‘Well, housing failed. Now let’s let them own their own’ as if somehow that will create ‘the remedy’. Of what? No one has yet specified the problem. Might as well say ‘Let’s have a Filipino maid in every household’ or ‘Let the boat people work off their passages. Let them be assimilated.’ Surely someone will come up with a suitable mantra … (FN2)

4

Mantras. Housing, education, employment.

Mantras. Employment, education, training. The whole of the Aboriginal lifeworld is enveloped in mantras. It’s a holy field of mantras, untouchable, unimpeachable, self-evident. Mantras are a crucial part of the new reality. Emblazoned on every chest they might now be set forth on banners stretched from tree to tree: HEALTH HEALTH HEALTH. The State has its banners, commerce has its banners, the church has its banners. Signs saying Tidy Towns are scattered in the grass. Aboriginality has become a matter of décor. Ah, here is the courthouse covered in Aboriginal designs. I suppose that makes it sacred; I suppose that makes it culturally relevant. Too bad the artist isn’t a local. Yes, they fly him in, two thousand kilometres plus, nice fat fee, two weeks all expenses paid, stays in the guest house (the place with all the signs, one reading PLEASE READ THIS SIGN), all meals provided, compound locked after 6pm. (‘No, it’s a good idea not to be out after dark.’)

Ah, the hand of friendship comes in many forms.

5

Life does not provide entitlements. It does not come with a bundle of rights. Life is merely. Anyone who thinks that rights and entitlements constitute a supplement to life might wish to think again. How can it be that life is or should be available for supplementation? This one’s ‘right to life’ is someone else’s impediment, a block in the road, a hindrance or curtailment. What we might seek after is a life as full as it might be. Fullness fares badly in the face of any demand for security. Where does it thrive, how does it thrive? Fullness is an experience — an experience of life as full. Such experiences are easily specified, easily called to mind. Make your own list. Almost all my own ‘fullest’ moments have been in the company of Aboriginal people. Let me start with the ocean liner in which I first travelled overseas, how it pitched and was borne shuddering backwards in a fierce gale in mid-Pacific. That was memorable, that was full. There was no food for the galley could not be operated. It was probably dangerous. I don’t remember that, I remember the prodigiousness of it.

I wasn’t sick.

But I was sick crossing the Bay of Biscay, the terrible rolling swells of the northern Atlantic, the false peristalsis that took over from my own. (Yes, all substitution, all substitute realities, may be a source of distress.)
When I first saw the Cézannes in the Jeu de Paume just down the block from where I was living in Paris, my first understanding that art could be intelligent, not merely pictorial.

But then Peret’s dancing yuk awum in the main street of Aurukun, about 1971, and Duncan Holroyd (from Edward River, as it then was) leaping into the dance out of sheer emotion, yet continuing to sing, great tears running down his cheeks: undoubtedly the most powerful performative moment I have ever witnessed and the memory of which still shatters me as it did then.
Or the young men throwing themselves into minh ponjtjath (frill-necked lizard), again at Aurukun.
Or the first time I witnessed that most brilliant of dance constructions, the peerless minh pangku (wallaby), again at Aurukun, with Peret and Bob enacting the kaha-‘ngken brothers, and Stingaree Barney breaking the spear-handle which marks the end of hostilities and the start of the dance proper: minh pangk kunjtju minh kalk iy kalk iy ....

Or Old Man Norman being dragged through the Crippled Man dance (kunalum) at Edward River, shortly before his death.
Or walking the familiar paths of Byron Bay, my home town, the headland, the ancient worn track between The Pass and Wattego’s Beach, with the ‘ghost’ of my big uncle, Tiger Kumuppa (kamap) at my shoulder, and attentive to every nuance of Aboriginal presence.

Or my daughter Eeinjin rolling cigarettes for me (I was too clumsy myself).
Or driving through Merluna Station late one afternoon with antelopine wallabies in droves occupying the track and Peret suddenly taking it upon himself to explain, in the clearest possible terms, the difference between coastal and inland systems of totemic organization …

Or the extreme delicacy of young Abiu’s gestures as he offered me the fresh sheets which were my due at my granddaughter’s funeral.
And countless more.

For never elsewhere have I encountered such vivid embodiment of personhood, in which each individual seemed to be possessed of some inner moral force (it’s what I take the French to mean by vertu), and at the same time, to encapsulate, in concrete corporeal form, history itself. They were not accidents, they were not accidental beings. They were not substitutable for each other. They were being ontologically realised. By comparison whitefellas seemed faded, impresent, lacking force — and to a significant degree interchangeable.

It was a world that never demanded explanations nor justification. People were evaluated, assessed — but not by and large from a moral perspective. After all morality serves little purpose if the lifeworld itself requires commitment to the real.
It is when life escapes the fierce imperium of necessity that things can begin to fall apart or become awry. If ‘humbug’ begins to assert itself on the one side, little wonder if there is the countervailing movement towards something exhibiting some of the ineaments, we might say, of irony. Central to this is a sort of sly knowingness. It doesn’t confront the problem but it does announce that it does know what is going on. It’s a refusal to be contaminated, sort of. It sits to one side. It handles the moral difficulties involved — ‘No, I do not really approve of that person’ — by a sort of self-absenting. In the extremes of that space, at the height of one’s self-abstention, one might, traditionally, have withdrawn into the world of fabrication (making spears or woomeras or baskets, preparing food) — and now art production, which, despite tendencies towards communalism, is an oddly ‘private’ activity, for the most part. Yes, people can work on painting together — just as if there were a large number of geese to pluck, everyone might pitch in. And in ceremonial contexts. Yet even there it is the activity of the solitary or singular artist/fabricator which is likely to be at the fore.

6

I’m not so sure I’d want Captain Cook as a relation. Not as an uncle, certainly, nor as a brother, let alone a grandfather. I don’t see him as father material either, for that matter. ‘Where’s daddy? ’ ‘Oh, he’s off circumnavigating  somewhere.’

Going round the world meant something once. Having a family also. I’m not sure about that now. Having an Aboriginal family helped cure me of family altogether. Not that I had anything against my Aboriginal ‘relations’ but in reality they come to me, as it were, one by one and unburdened by any notion of ‘family’. Unless that is conceived in the broadest of terms as a circle of interested — maybe super-interested —parties. And even then there were people who remained aloof, apparently indifferent.

The trick was, I think, to make a claim. And that claim could be ‘tizzed’ up in all sorts of ways. If children’s use of kin terms was unexceptional and attracted little more than amused commentary, the apparently ‘sincere’ use of kin terms by adults always had something of the phoney about it. No, I was connected, often powerfully, to particular people — and the more powerful and immediate the connexion the less and the more vague the kin specification. (FN3)

Once the claim was made you were ‘in’: you were owned, virtually as a piece of property. It is at this point that ‘jealous business’ could erupt. It was dangerous terrain.

You were not, we might even say, owned as kin. Kinship was in fact a modality that allowed a certain degree of separation from the world of claims; but not from the world of entitlements. In other words, a system of intimacy exists which takes precedence over kinship — and displaces the latter more or less to a position of abstract relations. In this respect kinship begins to take on some of the ‘abstractedness’ of the State — and something of the impersonality of its forms of ‘selectedness’. Kinship then begins to appear under an administrative guise …

7

The government official stands on the airstrip. There’s no one in sight. It’s hard to tell whether his plane has already left or whether it is yet to arrive. He carries a battered brown briefcase: one of the old school. He wears long beige-green socks and a floppy hat made of blue towelling. Those who know him know he’s a person you should not cross. Otherwise he looks inoffensive enough. He reaches into the battered bag and pulls out a mobile phone.  Where should he ring, Darwin or the local shire clerk? He tries both numbers. Neither answers. He checks the phone. Yes, it’s still powered up. 

8

Whatever is enacted has to compete with the street. I can hear him from here, the powerful voice. He’s got the local Bob Dylan bailed up – and the songster’s new girlfriend. I know she’s new because I haven’t seen her before. ‘Bob’ is silent. His interlocutor is screaming: ‘I BELIEVE IN GOD’, he announces in capital letters. The boy is in trouble; the girl cowers.
I come back and the shirtless psycho is still at it. ‘WHY DO YOU SING AMERICAN’, he screams. Then, appeasingly, ‘You have a really good voice, you know that, a really good voice.’ There is a short pause. ‘I’m going to let you sing.’

Immediately he softens, immediately he switches back to the scream. Threat, intimidation. I’ve seen this many times before, this alternation. Rodney, for one. One minute it’s all ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God’; the next moment it’s ‘I’ll break their fucking bones …’ He clenches his fist. It’s wrapped in invisible bandages. Where the Holy Mother bit comes from I have no idea. Not from the Reverend Bill, that’s for sure. Aurukun was a Catholic-free zone.

Two guys saunter over. Crims, ex–crims. They know their way round the scene. ‘Hey, bud, he’s our mate. Can’t you ease up a little, fair crack o’ the whip.’ (FN4)
That does little to appease him: ‘Fuck youse, who do you think you are? Don’t tell me what to do? I’m no dog. I’m no D-O-G.’ He spells the word out. He screams and screams, like a woman screaming. ‘Ring the T-R-U, ring the T-R-U.’ I have no idea what the T-R-U is, but he soon elucidates:  ‘Ring the Tactical Response Unit. Ring the Tactical Response Unit’. The two guys, the singer and his girlfriend make their escape. Captain Psycho picks up something and throws it after them. ‘FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU,’ he screams. It might be the guitar case. It’s as if everything has to be said in pairs or threes.

I’m not sorry to hear our Dylan Clone make his departure. He’s been around long enough, time to move on. It’s as if there’s a sort of ecology at work, an ecology of the street that at the end of the day self-regulates. Each street person displaces another street person. Some businessman will complain: ‘Hey, officer, they’re not good for business,’ as if business is the whole main thing. The cops come in a mob, move them on, the latest dero, the latest psycho, the latest crim or down-and-out off his medication. The paddy wagon drives off. The drinkers return to their drinks.
The whole episode is soon forgotten.

9

When thought fails performance may begin to announce its claims.

On the stage a horse and buggy suddenly make their appearance. The horse is a rather forlorn chestnut. Its name is of course Dobbin. In the back of the buggy is a huge white egg.

A white spotlight shines brightly on the egg.
At the rear of the stage is a large crocodile. It is dimly lit with a red light. It is more ominous than really threatening.
An old anthropologist wanders across the stage plaintively calling ‘Tommy, Tommy.’ There is a hint of an American accent.

A crowd gathers.
Voice 1: What for that egg? What for that nhepun?
Voice  2: Must be something
Voice  3: Can you eat him?
Voice  4: Don’t be silly
Voice  3: Can’t you boil him?
Voice  4 : Might be
Voice  3: Ah (triumphantly), must be scramble him

10

The Egg of the State, the bountiful thing, the flightless bird.  As one of the crowd says, ‘Must be bloody big bird somewhere.’

11

The image has a life of its own. It does not succumb to any final dismembering or interpretation. The image must be allowed to work its magic without too much scrutiny. You might as well challenge the shield of your enemy and what is emblazoned there. The more it is challenged the more impervious it becomes.

If I announce — foolishly — that I am an Enemy of the State it is not as if I am an Enemy of the People. The State has no consensual aspect to it. And if there is a contract — social contract — I have no idea what its terms are or what it encapsulates by way of my interest.

It is hard not to reach the conclusion that ‘The Contract’ is driven by particular sectional interests; that it does not represent (or guarantee) the social as such but congeals around particular conceptions and aggregations of the social which undoubtedly stand against the social as it might be envisaged in its entirety; that it is in its very nature divisive and partialising, on the one hand, and normalising and totalising on the other. It is less enabling than stifling and thwarting, and works less towards an objectification (recognition) of all interests than the valorisation of this or that interest. (FN5)

12

When routine is exalted to The All. When routine is challenged or ruptured.
I’m at the Clinic, a prestigious institution. The young women at Reception are helpful though apt simply to poke forms in front of you, to fill in. It’s a form of occupational therapy, I suppose. The specialist is a pleasant man, affable, with a fondness for small aircraft. He makes them, his violon d’Ingres. I’m impressed.

I’m encouraged to undergo a procedure. It’s expensive  (I’m not on a pension, I don’t subscribe to a Health scheme; I’m a free floater). I’m given more forms. There are procedures to observe: pre-op dietary measures; someone to accompany you from the Clinic once the anaesthetic has worn off sufficiently. With respect to the latter I wonder who is the beneficiary of this unnegotiable requirement, me (the patient) or the Clinic. I am not asked if there are any conditions I might wish to impose.

Marcellis is in a rush to take me through the pre-op instructions. ‘You’ll have to excuse me’, I say, ‘my eyesight is very poor’. Her response is to read through them even faster. ‘My eyesight is very poor’, I repeat, ‘that’s why I was on a disability pension.’ I might have said that my hearing was good, my memory exceptional, my capacity to absorb and to act on instructions in a methodical way first-rate. But by now I’m totally locked into my limiting condition; there’s no thought of possibility. ‘Just read here’, she says, stabbing at the printed pages with a cheap biro. ‘Look’, I say, ‘I’m to all intents and purposes clinically blind, certainly with printed material’. ‘OK, that’s alright, just read here.’ The biro stabs, again and again.

This is hardly the first time I’ve been subject to this bureaucratic disconnect. I wonder what the ‘normal subject’ looks like. I suspect there is no such thing.

Let us note that it is not the word that is king, it is the written word. Unless of course it is the doctor: ‘PATIENT INSTRUCTIONS  Unless otherwise instructed by the doctor’.

One is left to wonder at the insistence on ‘instruction’.

13

We can become accustomed to any life world, even the most sordid and oppressive. It’s the matter of return to it once one has been exposed to something else, a world less sordid, a world less oppressive. But, I wonder, if people keep on returning to conditions that are ostensibly unsavoury, unhygienic, ‘demanding’, maybe they have their reasons, not, as one might think, because it represents a place of last resort but because it offers a superior product, a superior, more entertaining, more sustaining social. No, people do not just vote with their bellies; and worlds of meaning may well triumph over worlds of servicing.

The trick then is not to challenge that life world, to treat it with disdain or the sort of casual disbelief that is apt to accompany an inner attitude or certainty of a ‘better way’. Those who adhere to this position should question why it is that life ways they undoubtedly consider intolerable should be so tenaciously clung onto. The trick is to offer, through example or suggestion, some adjustment, other ways of doing things which can be easily and willingly taken on board — something that one embodies in one’s own person, not some abstract dehumanised ‘system’. And crucially, of course, to be able to handle the ‘refusal’ or ‘rejection’ of one’s ‘little ways’ with something like aplomb. Sometimes I think that white society is in a frenzy of disbelief that what it considers the palpably good is so casually rejected, spurned, ‘misdirected’. Or that its universally conceived ‘general benefits’ are so casually disregarded, even ‘abused’.

Scene: A special ‘classroom’ in a small remote Aboriginal community. Standing side-by-side are three senior women, all of them former teacher’s aides and highly regarded. We know each other well, a relationship extending over decades. When I enter the room (on their invitation, as it happens) they remain silent, taciturn, even a little downcast. A European woman, stocky with short-cropped hair, is busily directing 7 or 8 infant charges at a low round table. Each of them sits on a little chair — a cut-down version of a conventional kitchen chair. In fact, the whole scene is an enactment of a conventional western meal-time scene.
The three Aboriginal women continue to stand. They’re not wearing shoes. They cross their arms in front of their chests. We exchange glances.

Nobody offers to introduce me to the ‘waypela’.  Nobody offers to introduce her to me. We might as well be two passing spacecraft. There is no attempt to create a social. I’m positioned as a sort of witness. I feel ‘ghostly’.
‘Now Darlene’, one of the little girls is instructed, ‘just wait’. Each pre-school tot is dispensed an identical serving of baked beans on white bread. Each has its own plate.

‘Darlene, wait.’

Control, orderliness, ‘equalising’, that’s today’s diet — along with the mediocre food. No idea that to sit properly means to sit cross-legged; that children of this age habitually take food ‘on the run’; that mealtimes are unscheduled and only roughly shared. Food appears on a demand or availability basis. There may be a sense of feast or famine. (FN 6)
Later I discovered that there was not just one program in place but three. Yes, suffer the little children indeed! Remediation at full blast! (FN7)

14

[the young man [dropped] [threw down] his spears but soon picked them up again]

Yesterday we were at Kurnell. As an exercise in the collectivity of the State, it’s instructive. The Aboriginal presence is slowly being inserted: a new ‘jetty’ to remind us that there was once a ferry to LaPa (La Perouse). Various ‘Auntys’ say things: ‘We came here, we had picnics, if we missed the ferry back we walked to Cronulla and caught the train back.’ It’s a long way around, it’s a short way across. I wonder why the ferry doesn’t still run. Inside the new Visitor Centre, there’s execrable art — but even if it was good one wonders what it would serve. It’s like any Visitor’s Centre anywhere. White triumphalism is not far away: ‘8 Days that …’ (FN8)
8 days is a long time to be anywhere. It’s not just a casual visit. You can learn a lot in 8 days.

The contradictions are everywhere. If Cook’s instructions were to take possession but only with the consent of ‘the natives’, how come that the obvious and candidly acknowledged resistance counted for nothing? How come the moment of ‘possession’ did not occur until the end of the ‘northern itinerary’, as I shall call it, on Possession Island?

At another level I wonder if anybody ever tried to discover the identities of the two men armed with spears on the shore. After all it is not such a great gap in time between 1770 and 1788. If their identities were never discovered, why not? And if they were discovered why did they not enter common parlance?

If the nation is still metallurgically conceived – we still encounter the curious notion that the nation was ‘forged’ here – it’s a curiously wan story (FN9). The only dramatic moment is the encounter on the rock –the shaking of spears, the firing of shots. What was achieved? It is hard to know.

As a kid I was impressed by Bank's Chair: the gravitas of granite. Now it all looks a little tragic. The gloss of the granite offers nothing more glamorous or ‘stately’ than the Bank of New South Wales in another of my old home towns, Lismore. I’m not going to track back through the records to establish what, as I recall, was a dramatic divergence of judgment between these two ‘great men.’ Between Cook and Banks, I mean. At the end of the day it will be the assiduous aristocrat who will prevail over the assiduous navigator. Class. Yes, it is class that prevails.

How might it have been different? What might have been negotiated? Of course from this point of view — the view of negotiability — it was all a tremendous failure. It is this that might be considered in any historical reckoning – or should we say re-reckoning?
The encounter of anthropology assumes nothing. There can be no predetermined values or good or ways of doing things. Everything is up for grabs. Perhaps we need stronger notions than negotiation to address this encounter. The anthropologist is meant to reside beyond the parochial — a true modernist position. In reality all social actors are parochial to a greater or lesser degree, and anthropologists are not exempt from their ‘little ways’, the things they consider ‘natural’, the taken-for-granted of themselves. The important thing that anthropology offered was a consciousness of this dilemma — even if the hermeneutics of self and of disciplinary practice were in my view little advanced.  Experience tells me that all societies produce the curious and the incurious, the cruel, the bold and the timorous, the gullible and the ‘disbeliever’, the perceptive and the ‘unaware’. Cook may have found his ‘Man Friday’ on the shore, or someone less abject; and we suspect that Banks’s ‘blood brother’ may have been a different kettle of fish altogether. As for the unknown men on the rock how shall we know their natures except that the older was bold, audacious; and the younger, though a-feared, quick to recover his nerve and in any case willing to lend himself, we presume, to the task of defiant defiance.
The fact is Australia became Crusoe’s Other Island at that very moment. Defoe had written the history in advance. Thereafter it was all enactment. Defiance was not on the agenda; all that could be conceived was an ultimate compliance, despite the evidence. This is at the heart of the imperial attitude. And the casually assumed compliance even now far from complete or ‘achieved’.  
The task of anthropology — if it is to disassociate itself from that scientistic view of its practice that allows ‘business as usual’ (if we were numbering our strategies of exoneration this would have to be one of them)  — is to explore the possibility of encounter and sustainable long-term relationship. Not abstractly but in active practice. Anthropology has conventionally thought of itself as ‘limiting the contamination’, which translates as claiming a sort of ’hands off’ and, at one and the same time, a privileged insider status. (FN10)
Anthropology has historically favoured a relationship between the anthropologist (fieldworker) and a ‘key’ informant. In reality this can take the form of an intensely productive collaboration involving a high level of mutual regard between the two participants. Not that they can be expected to have the same end in mind and the divergences so great that we are invited to consider the existence of something like a collaboration at cross purposes. Indeed it may seem that the purpose of the relationship exists somewhat outside the relationship itself. What if this state of affairs were to be inverted, so that the principle purpose of the relationship is the relationship itself, and the aim of any activity conducted within the framework of the relationship, the intensification or furtherance of the relationship itself?

There is, of course, no need to specify the nature of that activity. Potentially any activity would do.

In centralising the production of art as an area of social action the current exhibition is intended to draw attention to something new in the anthropologist - ‘informant’ relationship in which the ‘contamination’ of the anthropologist may be welcomed as a provisioning of skills or, as I prefer to say, ’little ideas’. Those little ideas can take the form of knowledges acquired in the context of this ‘new social’ (they represent in a significant way the extent of the assimilation of the researcher into the life world they have entered and the development of practical knowledges: that is, knowledges that can be brought to bear) and an awareness of the nature of external sites (or scenes) of consumption. The ‘informant’ is re-conceptualised as a social agent with intentions of their own, either to valorise some existing social practice or orientation or to ‘persuade’ or instruct the external. Through the mediation of the ‘object’ — the thing (p6) produced — something new may be created, something unexpected, something ‘rich and strange’. This is not an easy task and the real creativity of it is to get beyond a situation best described, perhaps, as a ‘compromise in divergence’ and to come up with something truly untoward. The object itself becomes the sign and the exemplar of a new order.

Art is a privileged terrain for it appears to endorse within itself inventiveness and innovation. Of course we risk overestimating this aspect of it. And it would be clearly wrong to fetishize ‘change’ as a ‘good’ in itself. I am not talking about that; I am talking about the unfolding, the realisation of possibilities unleashed from out of actual social relations. Yes, out of and marking a movement towards new socialities. This is not to discount the power or real force of existing social expectations; these are not to be simply brushed under the carpet or to be dismissed as simply old hat or ‘fuddy-duddy’. The real success is to engage the possibilities without simply over-riding the legitimate concerns of the societies thus engaged — or allowing oneself simply to be dissuaded by the apparently implacable forces arrayed against one. These are in reality the fires in which negotiated being are to be tested.

The odd thing is this: the more parochial the social, the less capable it will prove in achieving the social forms necessary for its long-term survival. My fear at the present conjuncture is that the State has become over-consolidated; and the official — the State’s official face — represents the most parochial of all parochial orders. The market offers no safeguard; it does not free. It merely trivialises the real social issues and contestations at stake.

John von Sturmer, October 2009

Footnotes:

FN1: The expression is adapted from the writer, Richard Flanagan. The reference is to Peter Dombrovskis’s images of the Franklin River in Tasmania, notably that of Rock Island Bend. Of the latter it has been said that it swayed a Federal election (Hawke’s victory in 1983).

FN2: Julie Bishop has a ‘suitable’ mantra, all about ‘people smugglers’, as if they are indeed at the heart of the world refugee problem. Such mantras are a crucial component of what I shall call ‘strategies of exoneration.’ You remove the problem by reducing it to the simplest possible formula: not boat people but people smugglers. Do you get it?  People smugglers.  Now let me say it again:  It’s the people smugglers. Now, in case you missed that, let me tell you where the real problem lies: it’s people smugglers. Such mantras are the substitution of pseudo-thought for the possibility of active thought. We know this as the ‘party line.’ In general terms such pseudo- thought makes real thought impossible.
In case I am accused of political favouritism, let me note that two days later Julia Gillard was providing examples of her own. In response to claims that there was a crisis of teacher availability in the schools she slipped with great insistence into the mantra mode: ‘We have initiated an education revolution. My government has initiated an education revolution’. The reporter tries to pin her down: ‘But there is a shortage of teachers. What is the government doing about that? Does this mean larger classes? Are teachers required to teach outside their areas of competence?’ To which she replies: ‘As I was saying my government, the Rudd government, has initiated an education revolution’. Pushed further, she retreats to mantra 2: ‘The previous government, the Howard Government, allowed our education system to run down. There were 10 years of neglect.’ At which point she can return to mantra 1: ‘This is why my government has initiated an education revolution.’ Absent from any thought or consideration is that there may well be an education revolution going on before our very eyes, one of the signs of which is the difficulty of recruiting or retaining trained teachers … One but not the only sign.

It seems we live in a post-Orwell Age, in which things proceed as if Orwell never existed.

FN3: I have written elsewhere about McNaught Ngallametta and his ‘teasing’ use of kin terms with me. I was close to almost the entire Ngallametta family but it was almost as if we refused to ‘stabilize’ these relationships in kin terms. McNaught (and Joe)’s mother was ‘Z+’ to Peret and this would have been the most obvious route to track (or trace) through. However, despite the extreme closeness of our relationship, Peret and I never thought of each other in such an idiom. And this despite his youngest son’s decision to call me grandfather — but in this case tracking through his mother.

McNaught was always the one for clever manoeuvering and ironic commentaries on, for example, the ‘gap’ between the ‘official’ language (English) and the various Wik languages (including his own:  Kugu-uwanh), and more generally the blackfella and whitefella conditions (estates!) — struck upon the ‘solution’ of calling me pama thep ngathunge. The pama thep is routine, formulaic: ‘old man’. Ngathunge is a rather obscure and rarely used grandparental term. He shortened this to thung or thunge.  It took a while for me to realise it was a play on my name: John!

FN4: No, not Rudd’s unfortunate sauce bottle!           

FN5: The issue of gay marriage is interesting from this respect.  ‘Gayness’ might have been conceived as representing an entirely ‘other’ conception not only of sexuality but indeed of social existing. By seeking to ‘adhere’ or to attach itself to the ‘normalcy’ of heterosexual matrimonial relations it seeks to dissolve its otherness in ‘straight’ terms. This aligns it precisely with the ‘movement’ of the State — and the terms of the ‘Social Contract’ which appears incapable of imagining conditions of social being outside the terms it offers.

FN6: Is this an example of the behavioural patterns Professor Sutton [GET REFERENCE] seeks to institute, ‘orderliness’ versus ‘chaos’, sitting on a chair versus sitting on the ground, compulsory order (uniformitarianism) versus individual choice /assertion/‘willingness’— as if the only principle at work in the Aboriginal life world is the catastrophic? Of course such binarisms are insistent in Western thought (as they are elsewhere) and its preferencing of the ‘uniform’ over the ‘catastrophic’ reveals a deep desire to predict, plan, order, manage, regulate as opposed to other values (and necessities) congregated around issues of experience, responsiveness, availability, and a privileging of the opportunity and the opportunistic ... Not to say that ‘Aboriginality’ employs such a framework of thought (I mean, uniformitarianism versus the catastrophic).

In the West this has become the fable of the flippant, careless grasshopper versus the cagey, prudent, prudential ant. Even at infant school I thought it was a horrible, mean and joyless story and I wrote my own anti-account …

FN7: How are we to account for such wilful and apparently erratic proliferations? And the stripping of local obligations and responsibilities away from those most directly involved in favour of external agencies? It might be noted that even the former teacher’s aides occupied a position, even in their former roles, midway between local responsibility (self-determination) and the external (assimilation). It is not surprising that they should look somewhat lost and that their participation had something of the ritualistic to it. A going-through-the-motions except they were virtually inert. (It is here that the ‘blakfellas’ become ‘impresent’, stripped of personality and agency, and begin to ‘abstain’.) The terms liminal and marginal are inadequate to describe this positioning. The ‘white’ functionary was, by comparison, in full ritual mode  —performing even excessively the role she had been assigned. We might call this ‘presence-in-impresence’.

FN8: Yes, the ‘Eight Days that Changed the World’, an odd echo of John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook the World, his famous account of the Bolshevik Revolution. The ‘frame’ has now been appropriated by economists and other writers to refer to the recent economic ‘crisis’, the 8 days in September 2008.

FN9: They might of course mean ‘improperly or fraudulently confected’ — but I don’t think so!