Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition

This is an accidental special issue. The collective shape and orientation of the essays presented here did not originate in response to a formal call for contributions. It simply happened. Our title, Technologies of Public Persuasion, was imposed somewhat arbitrarily on essays that came together, as it were, on their own, in ways unimagined by the authors and the editors alike. One of the rarer pleasures of editing a journal is when unsolicited submissions begin to signal, assert, and gravitate toward a new problematic of which the editors and their committee of readers are not fully cognizant. Such an emerging problematic cannot be grasped in terms of a thematic unity, although this special issue does have a common theme. On the surface, each of the essays is concerned with the communicative dimension of public-making and peoplehood, an enduring theme in critical political theories and the allied democratic social imaginaries. More specifically, the essays focus on material technologies of public speaking and communication—ranging from how the transparency of a national language in Indonesia can create a space for national formation (Webb Keane) to how gramophone reproductions can rupture and supplement traditional pedagogy in south Indian music (Amanda Weidman) to how

Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality

W hy does the recognition of peoples’ worth, of their human and civil rights, always seem to be hanging on the more or less fragile branches of a family tree? Why must we be held by these limbs? The two archives prompting this meditation are not new to me or to anyone else. Moreover, the social worlds and visions of these two archives are, geographically speaking, worlds apart. Stacks of land claim documents sit to the left of me. Some of these documents concern an Australian indigenous claim I am currently working on. Others compose the archives of claims already heard that I hope to use as a precedent for what I am trying to argue in the current case. All of them demand a diagram of a “local descent group.” That is what I am doing right now, drawing a genealogical diagram, a family tree, using now-standard icons for sex and sexual relationship: a diamond represents a man; a circle, a woman; an upside-down staple, sibling relations; a right-side-up staple, marriage; and a small perpendicular line between these two staples, heterosexual reproduction. The book I am currently reading, Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son, lies to the right of me. Family Values is a first-person account of the radicalization

Thinking Sexuality Transnationally: An Introduction

R e c e n t l y , there has been a small but discernible “transnational turn” in lesbian and gay studies and queer theory. Queer study groups on globalization have appeared at numerous universities and colleges, and a handful of national and international conferences have been held, including “Queer Globalization,” organized by the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York in April 1998. This issue of GLQ is the outgrowth of one such initiative, a yearlong seminar on sexual identities and identity politics in transnational perspective that was organized in 1997-98, under the auspices of the Chicago Humanities Institute, by the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.’ University of Chicago faculty had applied to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 1993 for a grant to organize the seminar and three small related conferences, which proposed to examine the effect of the increasingly transnational mobility of people, media, commodities, discourses, and capital on local, regional, and national modes of sexual desire, embodiment, and subjectivity. The impetus for the yearlong seminar was a growing sense that transnational sexual diasporas were transforming the sexual politics and cultures of many nation-states. Postcolonial nations were witnessing the emergence of sex-based social movements whose political rhetoric and tactics seemed to mimic or reproduce Euro-American forms of sexual identity, subjectivity, and citizenship and, at the same time, to challenge fundamental Western notions of the erotic, the individual, and the universal rights attached to this fictive “~ubject.~’ New forms of “gay/lesbian” or “queer” identity, of sexuality, of intimacy, erotics, and community were emerging in these hybrid cultural fields and calling into question dominant

Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition

In the  introduction of the ethnology Kamilaroi and Kunai, the Reverend Lorimer Fison described a sensation he experienced studying the ‘‘intersexual arrangements’’ of indigenous Australians. He described feeling ‘‘ancient rules’’ underlying the Kamilaroi’s and Kunai’s present sexual practices, catching fleeting glimpses of an ancient ‘‘strata’’ cropping up from the horrific given conditions of colonial settlement, sensing some ‘‘something else,’’ ‘‘somethingmore’’ Kamilaroi andKunai than even theKamilaroi andKunai themselves, a some thing that offered him and other ethnologists a glimpse of an ancient order puncturing the present, often hybrid and degenerate, indigenous social horizon.1 Fison pointed to this ancient order as the proper object of ethnological research and used the promised feelings this order produced to prod other ethnologists to turn its way. But Fison cautioned, even admonished, other researchers that in order to reach this order and to experience these feelings they had to be ‘‘continually on thewatch’’ that ‘‘every last trace of white men’s effect on Aboriginal society’’ was ‘‘altogether cast out of the calculation.’’ 2 Only by stripping from their ethnological analysis the traumatic effect of settlement on indigenous social life could the researcher reach, touch, and begin to sketch the outline of that thing, which was not the present corrupted Aboriginal social body

THE GOVERNANCE OF THE PRIOR

This essay asks how critical indigenous theory might intervene in the field of critical theory. What originates here that does not in other disciplinary phrasings and phases and cannot without doing some violence to the tasks indigenous critical theory sets for itself? It begins to answer this question by introducing a form of liberal governance – the governance of the prior – that critical indigenous theory illuminates. And it argues that rather than referencing a specific social content or context, social identity or movement, critical indigenous theory disrupts a network of presuppositions underpinning political theory, social theory and humanist ethics (obligation) which are themselves built upon this form of liberal governance.

Consuming Geist: Popontology and the Spirit of Capital in Indigenous Australia

n 16 August 1998, several people from Belyuen and I drove to Wadeye (Port Keats) and ran into the ark of a covenant, a building underway aimed at housing an indigenous spirituality. This building has several aspects, modalities, and scales—physical, subjective, textual. It is dispersed across multiple social fields—law, business, and public life—and the purpose it serves goes by several names: cultural tourism, ecotourism. In this essay, I seek to understand the sources and limits of this built environment and its social, subjective, and economic implications for indigenous Australians. David Harvey (1989: 339) has noted that post-Fordist capitalism seems to be dominated by “fiction, fantasy, the immaterial (particularly money), fictitious capital, images, ephemerality”; the stock market and various financial instruments being well cited examples. Herein, I examine a related market—the market in the uncanny, the mystery (rather than the mysterious), the fourfold (morphe) as it operates in northern Australia. I will propose that one of the operations of this market is to hold certain groups of people accountable for manifesting for certain other groups a Heideggerian form (morphe). It will also emerge that the market itself relies upon a complex set of textual mediations generating both an object for and a limit to capital forms of commodification. What might these particular modalities of capital and textuality tell us about the dynamic relation among text, subject, and economic practice at the end of the millennium? More specifically: How do we understand the textual sources of the indigenous Spirit that capital commodifies? Note: I will seek the answer to these questions not in

The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love. 2009 meeting of GDAT

Two spectres haunt the debate this year, the motion of which is ‘the anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love’. The first is that oft-encountered bugbear ‘ethnocentrism’ – Jeanette Edwards asks: ‘Could it be that the search by some anthropologists for love, the determination to find love in the ethnographic record, is because they are also in love with the idea of love?’ In other words, are some anthropologists fixated on love because of its important place in the Euro-American tradition and in ideologies of the individual? A converse trend is the concern that forms or expressions of romantic love in various non-Western locales are influenced by (or even a product of) Westernization and globalization. Critique of Anthropology 31(3) 210–250 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X11409732 coa.sagepub.com

An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene

This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and the discussion encompasses an exploration of her ideas on biopolitics, her retheorization of power in the current conditions of late liberalism, and the situation of the inhuman within philosophical and anthropological economies. Povinelli describes a mode of power that she calls geontopower, which operates through the governance of Life and Nonlife. The interview is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction.

The Part That Has No Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss

Hinged to a conversation between the author and her friend and colleague (now deceased) in Australia in 1993, this essay examines an ethical and conceptual gap that opens between an analytic that focuses on the disruptive nature of enjoyment in heteronormative orders and the distributional price of exceeding the Law in settler normativities. It pivots on the claim that the general availability of intensified potential, like the general availability of enjoyment, doesn’t negate the specific social (dis)orderings that differentiate and then treat different bodies differently. It asks what purchase might accrue conceptualizing this conversation as an instance of a “queer bond.”

The Three Figures of Geontology

Social Nature and the Limits to Capital,” March 2014, minor revisions June 2014, Jason W. Moore (blog), http://www.jasonwmoore.com/. 20. Joel Achenbach, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” Achenblog (blog), Washington Post, August 3, 2010, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/achenblog/. Achenbach is reporting on the talk that National Geographic’s Dennis Dimick gave at the Aspen Environmental Forum. ANTHROPOCENE FEMINISM book interior.indb 63 1/18/17 11:09 AM 64 elizabeth a. povinelli 21. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197– 222; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 22. Bruno Latour, “Perspectivism: ‘Type’ or ‘Bomb’?,” Anthropology Today 25, no. 2 (2009): 1– 2. In this editorial, Bruno Latour reviews a debate on “Perspectivism and Animism” between Philippe Descola (College of France) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (National Museum of Rio de Janeiro) that took place at Maison Suger, Institute of Advanced Studies, Paris, on January 30, 2009. 23. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman; Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 24. Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), x. 25. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay of the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 10. 26. I elaborate the preceding points in “The Will to Be Otherwise/The Effort of Endurance,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 3 (2012): 453– 75. 27. Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 5: 779– 95. 28. Colebrook, Death of the PostHuman; Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Alresford Hants, U.K.: Zero Books, 2011). 29. John Carriero, “Conatus and Perfection in Spinoza,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 35, no. 1 (2011): 74. 30. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 31. Jane Bennett, “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 47– 69 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). See also Arun Saldanha and Hoon Song, eds., Sexual Difference: Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (London: Routledge, 2014). 32. Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, expanded ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 122. 33. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 34. Nafeez Ahmed, “Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent over Climate and Energy Shocks,” The Guardian, June 14, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/en vironment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism. ANTHROPOCENE FEMINISM book interior.indb 64 1/18/17 11:09 AM Anthropocene Feminism Richard Grusin, Editor CENTER FOR 21ST CENTURY STUDIES university of minnesota Press